Simply put, a contact center is who your customers reach out to when they need to speak with a customer service representative. Whether they have a question about the product or service they purchased from you, a complaint, or positive feedback, they communicate it by reaching out to the contact center.
With the advancement of technology, 24-7 customer service support is becoming the norm. However, most companies don’t have the financial ability or the resources to staff their businesses around the clock. That is where contact center as a service comes in (CCaaS). I know, another acronym to remember!
“Contact centers as we know them today were designed and deployed at scale in the 1960s and the management models, governance models, and standards that defined them are still alive and well today. We call this Contact Center 1.0. Вut the foundation for customer engagement in sales, service, and support for more than 60 years is in serious need of modernization and reinvention.” -RingCentral
CCaaS enables your customer base to seamlessly contact a human being via their contact method of choice. You can choose to have instant messaging chat bots on your website, constant email monitoring, and call center services so that your customer never has a hard time reaching someone. The best part is, that you don’t have to staff, manage or handle any of the technological upgrades. CCaaS is a full service so that you worry about your day to day business, and a third party (like Matrix-NDI and our best-of-breed partners) manages all the contact center components for you. At the end of the day this saves you time, money and allows your resources to focus on what they do best.
Customers have the upper hand when it comes to choosing the businesses they engage with. No matter which industry you are in, you have competitors and you need to be doing more then they are to make sure your customers are receiving the best of the best. You can provide top of the line goods and services, but all it takes is one bad customer service experience for a customer to choose to go to a competitor.
When you choose to purchase contact center as a service you no longer need to manage or house an on-premise technology solution. This means hardware that takes up space in your location will no longer be needed or become outdated. Upgrading and managing any physical hardware is extremely expensive, and with cloud technology it is completely unnecessary.
We live in an instant-gratification world. Current and potential customers want to receive answers to their inquiries the second they reach out. Think about how you do your personal banking, would you rather trust the bank you can reach at any time of the day or night, who has friendly and knowledgeable customer service representatives? Or would you rather go with the bank who has no overnight support. When you run into a case of card fraud or notice unknown activity on your account, you want help and you want it NOW.
Wondering what the difference is between a call center and a contact center? Check out this blog by Lola Barbier. She does an awesome job of laying out the differences between the two.