CCaaS: What to Assess Before You Invest

The contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) market is in the advantageous position of outperforming many other contact center IT sectors due to its critical core capability—managing omnichannel inbound and outbound interactions—as well as its breadth of functionality (encompassing contact center infrastructure, workforce engagement management, CRM, and artificial intelligence, among other components) and its open platform structure. When a contact center must limit IT investments, purchasing a mission-critical AI-enabled infrastructure solution is often moved to the top of the list.

The CCaaS Competitive Landscape

CCaaS is a highly competitive market with 200-plus global vendors aggressively vying for business. The worldwide availability of third-party public data centers (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, etc.) and international connectivity enables CCaaS providers of all sizes and geographies to succeed in this market.

However, the solution must also properly address data sovereignty and regulatory requirements, and the vendor should have in-house or partner-provided regional sales capabilities. The CCaaS market has established global leaders and local favorites in different vicinities. However, loyalty is frequently tied to the solution that best meets a company’s needs, not to an established long-term relationship.

Top Buying Criteria for CCaaS

Selecting the right CCaaS platform and partner for your company can be complex and lengthy, as there are many factors (and vendors) to consider. It’s an industry best practice to build a selection team that includes participants from the business, IT, security, and procurement groups. Below is a partial list of buying criteria:

1. Meets your organization’s functional requirements.
2. Provides support in all required geographies.
3. Provides/supports a fully integrated unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS)/CCaaS offering
4. Has an up-to-date, resilient, and highly scalable architecture.
5. Meets your company’s service-level requirements.
6. Supports your organization’s telecom strategy in all operating countries.
7. Has out-of-the-box integration with your CRM solution, or will build it on a timely basis.
8. Contains an open communications platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) layer, which easily enables third-party system integration.
9. Interoperates with legacy premises-based systems not moving to the cloud.
10. Provides internal or partner resources for system implementation and integration.
11. Has a good reputation for providing ongoing support.
12. Aggressively incorporates AI/generative AI (genAI) throughout the platform and supports the use of third-party AI/large language models.
13. Meets your organization’s security requirements.
14. Has a product road map aligned with your business direction.
15. Offers pricing models (e.g., seat or consumption) and costs that meet your financial needs.
16. Generates a strong business case with a payback of 6 to 18 months.

It’s standard operating procedure to create a request for proposal (RFP) documenting all functional, technical, operational, support, implementation, security, and pricing requirements. The RFP should also assist the team in assigning priorities for the CCaaS selection process. It’s equally important to see a demonstration of each platform’s essential features and to validate them during reference calls.

AI Rules

AI is being incorporated throughout CCaaS platforms and in all 45-plus applications used by contact centers. Two groups of AI-based solutions already in the market include customer-facing self-service, or conversational AI (CAI), applications and internal-facing agent assist (or augmentation) applications. These include real-time guidance (RTG)/next-best-action (NBA) and automated post-interaction summarization solutions. Applications in both groups leverage AI-enabled capabilities such as transcription and conversation analytics and genAI. Such solutions enhance the customer and agent experience, improve productivity, and/or increase sales or collections. While it is early in their adoption cycle, both types of applications provide quantifiable benefits to organizations, and much more is on the way.

In the future, AI in the form of predictive analytics (which leverages a variety of AI technologies) will become the core CCaaS brain, orchestrating and coordinating operation of the 45-plus contact center systems to continuously optimize performance. Leading CCaaS providers are already building a consistent approach to applying AI throughout their platforms.

CCaaS Outlook

The total addressable market (TAM) for CCaaS is large and growing. Although not all companies will adopt CCaaS, as there are legitimate reasons for some to have premises-based solutions, DMG expects to see a great deal of activity in this sector as platforms gain acceptance. An important driver of CCaaS adoption, which is still evolving, is the massive growth of digital interactions that innovative CCaaS platforms are designed to handle.

Donna Fluss, founder and president of DMG Consulting, provides a unique and unparalleled understanding of the people, processes, and technology that drive the strategic direction of the dynamic and rapidly trans forming contact center and back-office markets. Fluss can be reached at donna.fluss@dmgconsult.com.

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