Open CCaaS vs. Closed CCaaS: The Future of Contact Centers Is Now

For decades, customer experience (CX) was predominantly managed by call centers. When a customer had a query or problem, the quickest and easiest way to get in touch with a company was through a phone call.

Then came the Internet, smartphones, and social media—and the CX landscape changed.

Even though e-mail, chat, video calls, and other digital channels have served as the core means of communication for longer than most people can remember, it took businesses a lot of time to shift their mindset and supporting structure from a “call” center to an omnichannel contact center.

Despite being openly and proudly “in the cloud”, most companies still have telephony-first contact centers. Being cloud-based is great, but still focusing on telephony as the foundation of your contact center tech stack prevents you from exploring the real possibilities of a modern—open—Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platform.

One that doesn’t limit your customers’ options but gives them the best experience they could have on the device of their choice. One that gives you insights you never thought you could have access to. One that not only solves your resourcing difficulties but sends your workforce efficiency metrics through the roof.

Intrigued? Read on to find out how you can revolutionize your customer engagement efforts using an Open CCaaS platform.

What Is Open CCaaS, and How Is It Different from Closed CCaaS?

First-generation, closed CCaaS is typically a telephony-first, all-in-one platform that limits your ability to adapt and grow as new technologies and customer expectations arise. Closed CCaaS:

• Limits contact centers’ choices, forcing them to settle for almost good enough vs. best-in-class solutions
• Restricts a brand’s ability to leverage the power of their data as it is siloed and not easily integrated with other systems
• Lacks a CX Automation focus and inhibits the adoption of AI and future innovation.

Open CCaaS is focused on continuously increasing CX Automation in the contact center to elevate CX and reduce operating costs. It places an equal emphasis on digital channels as well as voice and gives you the flexibility to respond to the change in consumer behavior.

By being ‘open’ to a range of channels and modalities rather than focusing on just the voice channel, you have the freedom to choose the right path for your contact center—now and in the future—so you can elevate customer experience and achieve best-in-class operations.

Open CCaaS helps future-proof your contact center by:

• Creating an efficient and informed hybrid workforce of humans and AI-powered bots
• Seamlessly integrating with any major automated call distribution system (ACD), and hundreds of external business applications
• Enabling businesses to evolve their contact center ecosystem at their own pace
• And bringing all communication channels and modalities together onto a single platform.

And this, essentially, is the future of contact centers. Today, brands employ 50 million CX employees globally at an annual cost of $2 trillion—in contrast with $65 billion spent on technology. It is clear that brands can no longer hire their way to providing better customer experiences.¹ They need open solutions to increase automation so they can elevate CX across channels while lowering the operating costs. At Verint, we call this CX Automation, and it is at the heart of our Open CCaaS Platform.

Introducing Verint Open CCaaS Platform

Now that we’ve discussed how Open CCaaS is different—and fundamentally better—than traditional, closed CCaaS, let’s dive into how we use it to maximize CX Automation. The Verint Open CCaaS Platform is open in all dimensions and built on the following five key pillars:

1.      Open Engagement Data Hub

The Verint Engagement Data Hub (EDH) makes sure that your data works for you 24/7. It unifies siloed engagement data from across your organization and makes it available for you to gain valuable insights, understand the behavior of your customers, employees, and bots, and more. You can learn more about Verint Engagement Data Management and the purpose-built Engagement Data Hub on this webpage.

2.      Open Verint Da Vinci AI

Verint Da Vinci AI is at the core of Verint’s Open CCaaS Platform. It uses real engagement data coming from EDH and leverages the latest AI models, both Verint’s own and other commercially available ones. Da Vinci injects AI into business workflows to deliver CX Automation and augments the contact center workforce with a team of specialized AI bots.

Each of these bots is designed to perform one unique customer engagement task (such as real-time agent coaching, knowledge search, interaction wrap-up, and more), which they do extremely well—letting your agents focus on tasks that create a differentiated customer experience.

3.      Open Best-of-Breed

Our open, best-of-breed approach means that you have the freedom to choose from market-leading solutions that meet your needs without having to make choices that might limit your future possibilities. You can bring your own telephony, bring your own CRM, and deploy the business applications that best suit your business at your own pace.

When you choose Verint Open CCaaS, it doesn’t matter where you start—you’re on your way to achieve best-in-class operations and maximize CX Automation and ROI.

4.      Open Ecosystem

Contact centers don’t work independently from the rest of the organization. They are strongly connected to other teams and departments who may use other solutions, platforms, and applications. But this doesn’t mean you should settle for fragmented customer service operations forever.

Our open ecosystem lets you connect your CCaaS to your existing ACD solutions, as well as leverage hundreds of APIs and adaptors at no charge to integrate with external sources. This gives you a unified view of your entire contact center to help optimize every single interaction.

5.      Open Enterprise

Modern customer engagement extends beyond the contact center. If you want to elevate CX, you need to break down the walls between the front, middle, and back office. Our open enterprise approach:

• Builds bridges between your contact center and the rest of your enterprise
• Gives your agents insights into website and back-office activity
• Enables resource sharing across locations and functions to optimize the labor force
• Lets your customers seamlessly transition from self to assisted service.

Open CCaaS Is the Way of the Future

This may be a lot to process all at once, but if there’s one thing you should take away from this blog, it’s that you have the opportunity to help future-proof your contact center operations.

Customers expect to interact with companies through the communication channel of their choice, and they want to have a great experience while doing it. First-generation, telephony-first CCaaS offerings can’t effectively meet those expectations.

If you want to elevate CX to today’s standards, you need today’s technology—from omnichannel customer interactions, to AI-powered bots, to CX Automation.

Click here to learn more about Verint Open CCaaS Platform. For further details, you can also:

• Read our eBook on the Four Challenges of Taking a Telephony-First Approach to CCaaS
• Check out the analyst report titled “AI and Automation is the Path to the Future for Contact Centers​” by DMG Consulting
• Watch our on-demand webinar called “Why Verint’s Open CCaaS Should be Your First Choice for CCaaS”

¹Note: We estimated our total addressable market for customer engagement software, the market growth rate, the number of knowledge workers and labor costs using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, McGee-Smith Analytics, Pelorus Associates, and Gartner, as well as company estimates of $150 to $200 per month for the amount of software that is spent on each knowledge worker in the contact center and half that amount for knowledge workers in other customer engagement touch points.