CCaaS Buyers Guide

As you seek to more efficiently and effectively manage contact center interactions, you may consider a contact center as a service (CCaaS) solution. These solutions offer a variety of capabilities to route, manage, and analyze contact center conversations across channels. But while many of these solutions may look similar on the surface, they may not all meet your needs when it comes to lowering costs and elevating the customer experience.

Historically, brands built their contact centers based on telephony infrastructure, and as the industry started to shift to cloud, the first-generation cloud solutions were telephony-first and closed. Today, brands are focused on open solutions to increase automation so they can elevate CX across channels while lowering operating costs. In today’s fast-paced technology environment, brands should adopt platforms that are open in all dimensions to help future-proof their contact centers.

In this buyer’s guide, you’ll learn about the key capabilities of CCaaS and how to select an option that will help you meet your business goals. This guide is broken down into the essential elements of contact center interaction management, namely:

One of the primary capabilities of your CCaaS is to route interactions across communication channels to the appropriate agent and record the interaction as it occurs. Historically, brands built their contact centers based on telephony infrastructure, and as the industry started to shift to cloud, the first-generation cloud solutions were telephony-first and closed.

Today, brands are focused on open solutions to increase automation so they can elevate CX across channels while lowering the operating costs. While telephony is certainly still a critical channel for service delivery, it is not the
driving factor of CCaaS purchase decisions.

Open Approach to Telephony – As complex organizations have multiple regions, departments, and acquired business units, it is common for a single organization to use multiple telephony vendors. As such, your CCaaS decision should not require one single vendor for the telephony channel. Your organization should have the option to keep your existing telephony, make a separate cloud telephony decision, use multiple telephony vendors, or source it all from one place. In fact, you should have the option to decouple your cloud migration process from your telephony decision entirely, so you can maintain your on-premises telephony while deploying your CCaaS.

Intelligent Routing – Routing an interaction shouldn’t only be based on availability. Rather, interactions should be intelligently routed based on real-time artificial intelligence (AI) analysis of incoming customer conversations using dynamic business rules and workflows. Routing should be determined based on a number of factors, including both availability and skillset. Each interaction should be captured as part of the customer history such that as a new interaction is routed to an agent, the previous interaction history across channels is available to view.

Omnichannel Routing – Many CCaaS systems were built when the phone was the primary channel of communication. As customer behaviors have changed, your CCaaS should offer a wide variety of digital channels for customers to use, including social and private messaging channels. The application should have sophisticated routing across these digital channels as well as the phone. For telephony routing, the application should adopt an open approach that allows an organization to bring their own ACD, or combination of ACDs. In addition to routing to human resources, the system should also be able to route to bots where appropriate.

Third-Party Routing – While digital and messaging channels should be included as part of the platform, their use should not be required. As is the case with ACDs, all channel routing should adopt an open approach so that interactions can be routed to applications from a variety of vendors. The application should provide digital channel solutions but should not require these to be the only channels available to route interactions.

Omnichannel Recording – The application should securely record both the agent’s screen and the conversation for 100 percent of interactions across both voice and digital channels for compliance and quality purposes, with methods to help ensure recording is successful.

Redaction of Personal Identifiable Information (PII) – The application should have the ability to prevent sensitive information from being stored and viewed by users without the appropriate permissions. The recording should have the capability to pause and resume during the delivery of PII, and/or be able to automatically redact that information once the recording is complete.

Open Data Repository – Recording interactions is only worthwhile if the recorded data is usable and valuable. For instance, the recorded interaction should be tied to the customer record so agents can see what has occurred in previous interactions. Further, the recording repository should be open to allow for easy export and analysis by data lakes and other data hubs.

For many organizations, the growing number of customer interactions across channels is simply unsustainable with existing budget and resources. Automation through self-service is a critical capability to continue to deliver a high-quality customer experience. When done correctly, self-service options improve your customer satisfaction while simultaneously lowering costs. To improve operational efficiency while simultaneously differentiating their customer experience, brands should augment interactions with AI-powered CX automation with these key capabilities:

Omnichannel Containment Bots – You should be able to automate interactions in a consistent way across channels, whether in the interactive voice response (IVR) unit or through a website virtual assistant or Facebook Messaging. All channels should be supported by a bot that can be built once and then used across channels, so you can automate as many interactions as possible without excessive administration.

Conversational Intelligence – Your automated containment bots should be proficient at understanding everyday language and mapping customer requests to the correct intents. Interactions should feel conversational and personal rather than static. This requires AI to understand the nuances of human language, and capabilities to provide personalized responses and support for users to complete transactions through the bot.

Knowledge Management – Your knowledge base should be a central repository of data for both agent-assisted interactions as well as self-service. By offering knowledge management to your customers on your website, you give them a quick and easy way to get help on their own. The knowledge base should understand everyday language, so customers can easily find what they are looking for without knowing the exact terminology to use.

Interactive Voice Response – Even if a customer contacts you via the phone, you still have the opportunity to resolve their issue through self-service. Your IVR should be able to personalize call flows based on caller behavior and detect fraudsters in real time to mitigate risk. By analyzing goal completion, you should be able to gain insights to continually boost automation rates.

Seamless Transition from Self- to Assisted Service – As you seek to automate as many interactions as possible, some interactions will always require the human touch. When an interaction begins in an automated self-service channel, the transition to an assisted-service channel should be seamless. The agent picking up the interaction should be able to easily see what has happened in the automated channel and pick up the conversation where it left off.

Routing and recording interactions is only the first step. Connecting a customer to an employee does nothing to ensure the subsequent interaction will be efficient, accurate, and compliant. In today’s environment, agents are often working remotely while trying to balance a wide variety of customer inquiries, complex compliance requirements, efficiency metrics, and pleasing the customer. AI-powered tools can help agents in the moment, giving them the tools to improve efficiency, accuracy, and compliance:

Real-Time Agent Assistance – When an interaction occurs in an agent- assisted channel like the phone, you can still leverage automation to optimize the efficiency and quality of the interaction. Capabilities such as real-time agent assistance can listen to the call in real time and

offer assistance to drive the interaction to a positive outcome. This can include reminding the agent of compliance steps, indicating the ideal offer to cross-sell or upsell, and more.

Real-Time Contextual Knowledge – Your contact center agents field an unending stream of complex questions every day, and every second spent looking for answers adds to your average handle time. Your solution should not only include a robust knowledge management application but also should have the ability to automatically deliver relevant knowledge articles during the conversation based on the words that are spoken.

Real-Time Coaching – Furthering the idea of real-time agent assistance, your agents shouldn’t have to wait until days after an interaction to receive coaching. Real-time coaching capabilities can personalize real-time assistance to the specific KPIs where an agents are struggling, offering them targeting assistance in the areas where they need it most.

Interaction Summary – Automation doesn’t stop when an interaction is complete. Agents shouldn’t need to spend time in after-call work manually summarizing what they have just done. An AI-generated interaction summary should be available automatically at the conclusion of every interaction to virtually eliminate after-call work.

By now, you’ve routed your interactions to the right bots or agents and automated them when possible. But how do you know if the interaction was successful, and how you can improve? Analytics will always play a key role in your customer engagement strategy, so you can continually improve as customer behaviors change. Customer engagement analytics span multiple areas. Be sure to look for these capabilities to help ensure you can keep improving the quality of your interactions.

Unified Omnichannel Insights – Contact center conversations are a goldmine of insights about issues, process inefficiencies, and more. But since customer preferences have evolved to use digital channels as often as the phone, interaction insights should show a unified view of interactions across both voice and digital channels. Reports should show a unified view of sentiment, topic, trends, and other areas of interest.

Accurate Transcription – Your analytics can only provide valuable insights if they are based on accurate data. Accurately transcribing noisy contact center conversations is no simple task. Your CCaaS solution should be capable of high levels of transcription and comprehension accuracy across multiple languages.

Alerting on Emerging Issues – When a new issue arises, time is of the essence to understand the problem and take steps to fix it. In many cases, the problem may be something you weren’t even looking for in your standard reports. You should have the capability to detect and alert on emerging issues as they happen so they can be rectified immediately. The platform should have the ability to identify where changes are needed to conversational intents and offer a low-code interface for a business user to make these changes.

Access for Business Users – Your data holds valuable insights, but in many organizations, these insights are only accessible to data analysts or other technical users. To get maximum benefit from your data, your business users and executives should be able to easily gain insights from your data without any technical knowledge.

Omnichannel Quality Evaluations – In addition to interaction analytics, quality evaluations are an essential way to continually improve your customer experience. In some cases, these quality evaluations only cover phone conversations. As customer behavior has shifted towards digital channels, these quality evaluations must span interactions across all channels, not just the phone.

Automation of Quality Evaluations – Manual quality evaluations typically only cover 1–3 percent of interactions. With this tiny subset, it’s impossible to get a full picture of the quality of your customer service. Rather, you should look for a solution that uses artificial intelligence to automatically evaluate up to 100% of interactions across all channels. This automation should continue throughout the quality lifecycle, including automatically assigning coaching and elearning sessions based on the results of the evaluation.

Inclusion of Customer Perspective of Quality – Quality forms show you if agents are doing what you’ve asked them, but they don’t show if the customer is actually satisfied. Adding the customer perspective to your quality program lets you know if you are truly meeting your customers’ needs.

The final component of your CCaaS solution helps ensure you have precisely the right number and type of employees to handle customer demand. It’s important to accurately forecast demand, so you have enough staff to efficiently handle customer requests without overstaffing and paying for resources you don’t need. These capabilities are critical to get this delicate balance right:

AI-Powered Omnichannel Forecasts – Forecasts are only valuable if they are accurate. Your solution should use AI to analyze a variety of internal and external factors to accurately predict customer demand across all channels.

Omnichannel Scheduling Options – Your solution should offer a variety of options for how to staff agents across all of your communication channels. This may include scheduling agents for a single channel, scheduling blocks for each channel during a single shift, or scheduling blended agents.

Streamlined Hiring Process – When long-term forecasts indicate hiring is needed, your application should be able to track the progress of candidates as they are found and onboarded. The hiring process should use automation to decrease the time and cost to hire and intelligently select candidates who are likely to perform well and stay longer.

Flexible Scheduling – To retain and engage your top agents, you need to offer flexible scheduling options so your employees can balance their work and life commitments. Your solution should offer options like shift swaps, split shifts, and voluntary time off (VTO) as well as a self-service mobile app for employees to manage their schedules.

Intraday Adjustments – Supervisors need a user-friendly view of how scheduled resources match up against actual volumes and the ability to make adjustments in real time to account for unexpected shifts in customer inquiries.

Enterprise View – While many applications simply manage your resources in your contact center, your back office, branch, or store may also have resource inefficiencies. You may want to seek out a system that has a broader view of forecasting and scheduling to better leverage resources outside of your contact center.

Most traditional CCaaS solutions are closed, making integration and data flow challenging, if not impossible. This closed approach makes it difficult for organizations to get the results they are looking for. Instead, you should look for platforms with an open approach to CCaaS.

What does it mean to be open? An open approach to CCaaS includes these five pillars:

1. Open Data – Engagement data in CCaaS is often locked down and inaccessible. This leaves organizations with a blind spot when they are trying to get a holistic view of their customers and their CX. Likewise, when it is difficult to bring data into the system, your CCaaS may lack critical context that can help give the full picture of the customer to drive a more personalized Instead, data should flow freely both in and out of the system for a complete view of customer engagement data.

1. Open AI – AI and automation are critical to improving the customer experience without raising AI is innovating at a rapid pace, but it’s critical to be able to quickly take advantage of these new capabilities. Innovation occurs in both internal AI models as well as commercially available models. As such, an open AI approach allows organizations to take advantage of AI from multiple sources with an architecture that blends purpose-built and commercial AI models. These AI models are injected directly into the user workflows and processes, putting AI at the users’ fingertips right when they need it.

3. Open Ecosystem – Contact center technology does not exist in a vacuum. Every organization has multiple existing applications around CRM, HCM, communication channels, and Your CCaaS platform should be able to easily integrate with these third-party applications to send and receive data for mutual benefit.

4. Open Best of Breed – You shouldn’t have to settle on “almost good enough” capabilities for any part of your You shouldn’t sacrifice quality for simplicity. Look for a CCaaS solution that offers best-of-breed solutions across the platform and the openness to select just the solutions needed to solve your business challenges.

5. Open Enterprise – Customer engagement extends beyond just the contact Don’t settle for a CCaaS that is closed to the rest of your organization. Instead, look for the ability to view and manage the entire customer experience, even outside the contact center—including back office, branch, retail locations, and self-service.

Managing customer interactions is not a simple task. It involves multiple steps, from self-service and escalation to assisted service, to routing interactions, providing real-time agent assistance, and analyzing the results

to improve over time. Each of these requires best-of-breed capabilities for a complete solution to meet an organization’s business goals. Brands need a CCaaS platform that is built to drive CX automation—with AI and data at its foundation and a future-proof approach to protect their investment. Verint Open CCaaS was built on an open platform with Verint Da Vinci™ AI at its core.

We’ve worked with the top brands across industries to help organizations save millions while providing a differentiated customer experience.