What CCaaS Trends Will We See In The Coming Years?

The contact centre has evolved dramatically in recent years. Complex and inefficient call centres have been replaced by “customer experience” centres, capable of empowering users through a variety of channels and media. Perhaps one of the most significant changes of all has been the adoption of cloud-based contact centres, built to offer organisations agility and scalability.

CCaaS or Contact Centre as a Service platforms offer companies the freedom and flexibility they need to create dynamic CX centres that can be accessed from anywhere. In an age of hybrid and remote work, these tools have become increasingly popular. In fact, according to Accenture, they are accelerating toward an expected value of around $11.76 billion by 2028.

As interest in these cloud solutions grows, so does their range of features and functionality. In this post, we look at some of the major trends that are likely to influence CCaaS solutions in the coming years.

What CCaaS Trends Await Us?

1) Aligned CCaaS and UCaaS Tools

As companies move more of their communication to the cloud, it becomes more and more common to combine the back-end environment with the customer support team. Aligning UCaaS and CCaaS solutions on a single platform makes it easier for companies to maintain comprehensive visibility across all of their technology.

It also ensures that employees responsible for managing customer experiences can collaborate with subject matter experts and team members from across the company. With an all-in-one environment for communication, organisations can reduce the number of disparate invoices they need to manage each month and ensure their employees stay in sync and aligned.

Many evolving CCaaS providers are even starting to consider the concept of “XaaS” or “Everything as a Service”. These platforms allow companies to integrate not only their Unified Communication (UC) tools, but also other SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions with their call centre environments.

2) Advanced Features for Employee Experience (EX)

Engaged and empowered employees are crucial for any company that wants to create effective customer experiences. When workers have the right tools and support to work seamlessly in any environment, they are more productive, efficient, and able to satisfy customers. This has led many CCaaS providers to incorporate employee engagement tools into the Contact Centre as a Service space.

Increasingly, we’re seeing a growing number of tools built specifically to support all kinds of in-office, remote, and hybrid workers. Workforce engagement and management tools help schedule and organise employees, while gammification features keep staff motivated.

New call centre features are even emerging to provide business leaders with a way to track employee experiences. Reporting and analytics tools can track everything from technology adoption to changing levels of efficiency in an employee’s workflow.

3) More Channel Options

Both the UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) and CCaaS industries have begun to see an increasing focus on using multiple new channels and tools to communicate with customers. Over the years, consumers have begun to move away from relying solely on phone and audio conversations for the service and are starting to look at channels like messaging, social media, and even video.

In the years to come, CCaaS platforms will continue to introduce a variety of new platforms for business leaders to explore. Some already include tools and APIs that allow companies to integrate contact centre functionality into their own mobile apps or link to tools like WhatsApp. Many also include multiple options for aligning voice, video, and text communications in a single environment so agents can more easily manage their workflow.

4) Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) For Proactive Service

Most companies know that if they want to deliver valuable and personalised experiences to their target audience, they need to collect and leverage the right information. As a result, we are seeing a multitude of new analytics capabilities emerge in call centres. 

By using a combination of intelligent monitoring tools, machine learning (ML), and historical information, organisations will be able to stay one step ahead of potential issues facing their target audience. This could make it possible to remove them before they appear.

5) Improved Self-service

Artificial Intelligence is starting to play a bigger role in helping customers navigate their buying journey. While self-service solutions have been available within contact centres for some time, older solutions have largely focused on question-and-answer bots, designed to respond to specific words with predetermined phrases.

With 81% of customers indicating they prefer to troubleshoot on their own rather than contact an agent, self-service tools need to get more advanced. CCaaS providers are beginning to implement conversational analysis and natural language processing tools in their self-service portals to improve the customer experience. Intelligent bots and virtual agents can now complete tasks for customers and solve a wider range of queries with intuitive strategies.

These enhanced self-service solutions can also help optimise the employee experience by giving staff members’ access to intelligent tools that help them find crucial information automatically. The right tools can even provide next-best-action suggestions to employees when they’re struggling to deal with a complex query.

6) Increased Security and Control Functions

Finally, as regulatory guidelines and compliance concepts continue to evolve around the world, CCaaS providers are beginning to focus more on security and control. Many of the best tools now offer companies more choice in how they structure their contact centre environment.

Many CCaaS solutions are built in for encryption, multi-factor authentication, and access control, so businesses can maintain full visibility over the flow of data. It is even possible to create IVR tools and bots capable of complying with GDPR guidelines.

New advanced tools can help protect consumers and mitigate fraud by using biometric scanning to determine if a customer is who they say they are. AI bots can also automatically scan for policy risks and inform employees and business leaders when there is a security issue on their network.

Exploring the Evolving CCaaS Landscape

As the demand for flexible and agile call centre environments in the cloud grows, providers in this space are constantly looking for new ways to improve the quality of their solutions. Today’s CCaaS tools offer access to everything from AI automation and sentiment analysis to intelligent self-service.