These days, it seems the way people do business is moving faster and faster by the minute. As fast as business is moving and changing, so too are the expectations of customers. These days every customer wants to be considered a top priority by a business and they want to be helped immediately.

Fortunately, for businesses trying to keep up with a steady flow of customers, Contact Center as a Service or CCaaS solutions can help them do it. CCaaS solutions help companies offer the same aid to customers as on-site vendors. The foundation of CCaaS solutions—from email, text, chat, social media, automatic call distribution, PBX systems, computer telephony integration and other services—are delivered to vendors via a cloud service. That vendor is then responsible for any needed upgrades. By doing this, a provider and not a customer, owns and operates the CCaaS systems and customers can then subscribe to them.

It’s estimated that 94% of business enterprises rely on cloud services to streamline business whether it’s cloud-based phone systems and cloud based PBX. In that vein, CCaaS solutions offer many benefits to companies. Those benefits include:

• Better experience for the customer: At the heart of CCaaS solutions are tools designed to help customers. In the past, customers may have been subjected to being on hold for long periods of time, not getting a resolution to the problem they’re having, getting tangled up in a phone tree or having a bad experience with a customer service representative.
  Thankfully, CCaaS solutions are customer-centric and continuously evolve to better accommodate customers. A CCaaS allows analytic capabilities for representatives, desktop access to tools and multiple-channel integration that allows reps to interact with customers on their platform of choice.
• Saving money: Cloud-based CCaaS solutions offers significant cost savings including: lower power costs, streamlined billing, reduced downtime, reduced IT staffs, no upfront investments and full utilization of hardware. Bottom line: CCaaS solutions don’t require businesses to buy a lot of extra equipment up front, spend more on power or create more office space for more equipment. Upgrades are made via the cloud, so again there’s less need for physical equipment. As an added bonus, CCaaS solutions also allow companies to deal with more customers while using fewer agents and without losing productivity.
• Better analytics: If a company truly believes that it’s mission is to give their customers a good experience, the ability to gather data an analyze it is extremely important. Modern CCaaS providers offer plenty of tools and capabilities that can quickly analyze data and customer interactions across all different channels to give companies information designed to improve their customer service. A CCaaS can record and review phone calls to help companies identify training lapses. It can also set up alerts when agents may go “off-script” and it can monitor caller queues and voice responses menus and change them in a matter of seconds if necessary.
• Better time for agents: Traditional call centers can be frustrating for both customers and agents because information is scattered and technology is outdated, making it harder to communicate via multiple channels at once. Both of these shortcomings can make an agent appear incompetent and most times they’re not. CCaaS solutions offer agents access to hubs which have all the information they need from multiple channels. This saves those agents a lot of time and frustration trying to hunt for information and ultimately allows them to better help customers find answers to whatever issue they have.
• Being more available and more reliable: Perhaps the biggest benefit of CCaaS solutions is that they allow companies to scale their organization to the demands of business and customers. These solutions offer very high levels of reliability, availability and even recovery from disasters. These data centers are staffed constantly and companies only have to pay for what they use, rather than shelling out a lot of money upfront.

By embracing CCaaS solutions, companies can greatly enhance the way they offer customer service and customer service reps can feel more comfortable on the job, knowing they are armed with the knowledge and the data to help customers resolve their issues.