What Is Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS)?

CCaaS or Contact Centre as a Service is a cloud-based deployment model for buying contact centre technology.

Instead of buying an on-site product, you rent the product on a monthly basis. This is typically priced on a per-agent per-month basis.

CCaaS usually includes the core ACD (dialler) and IVR (interactive voice response) platforms but can also be extended to include workforce management and speech analytics.

As Nerys Corfield of Injection Consulting adds:

“Historically businesses with Contact Centres had two critical physical boxes stored in their server rooms that facilitated the efficient routing of calls. One, the PBX which routed call traffic around the business and the other, the ACD which had a greater depth of capabilities and routed calls into their contact centres.

Since the birth of the ‘as a service’ model in the 90’s, functionality historically serviced by these ‘pieces of tin’ in server rooms down the corridor have moved to someone else’s server room (the ‘cloud’) and the ACD became CCaaS and the PBX became UCaaS. The line from PBX to UCaaS is not as linear as this in truth, as players like Teams serve the Unified Communication needs of an organisation, but they aren’t necessarily connected to the PSTN (but let’s not get hung up on that!)

The depth of functionality available within the CCaaS solutions became broader as vendors developing the solutions (no longer manufacturers building tin) raced to service the ever-growing needs of both the contact centre operation and the desire from brand owners to offer customers more digitally focused routes to connect with their brand.”

Author: Robyn Coppell