BEYOND THE CLOUD OF MISCONCEPTION: EXPLORING THE CASE FOR CCAAS IN SMALL TO MEDIUM BUSINESSES.


BEYOND THE CLOUD OF MISCONCEPTION: EXPLORING THE CASE FOR CCAAS IN SMALL TO MEDIUM BUSINESSES.
The modern business landscape is mutating fast and with it, so are the misguided beliefs and tall tales associated with the solutions crafted to help navigate this change.
Let’s take Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS), for example. When you hear the term “contact centre”, what mental images spring to mind?
Do you envision a dull, overworked call centre with rigid and robotic practices? Or perhaps enterprises of unrelatable
scale with dedicated service teams relentlessly slogging away at call, after call, after call?
These widely shared, yet misinformed perspectives seal the current fate of cloud contact centre solutions and their lack of adoption in the world of small to medium-sized businesses. From the notion that CCaaS is exclusively built for large enterprises, to the incorrectly interchangeable use of the terms “contact centre” and “call centre”.
However, beyond the cloud of misconception lies a truly lucrative solution ideal for all, especially progressive SMBs with a penchant for enhanced communications and experiences.
There’s a wealth of compelling figures proving the potency of CCaaS in contention of the ever-evolving customer needs. Nearly half of businesses (43%) admit to struggling with the changing pace of customer expectations and market demand1. A staggering 90% of consumers state they won’t buy from a company following unsatisfactory customer service interactions2. And to top it all off... nine out of ten consumers demand seamless omnichannel service from the businesses they choose to interact with3.
It’s clear there’s a worthy case for CCaaS in small to medium-sized businesses, but a lot of myths still stand in the way of widespread adoption. Over the course of this whitepaper, we’ll be dispelling the most common contact centre myths, exploring its ability to activate employee potential and enhance experiences no matter the industry, so we can set the record on its place in the SMB world once and for all.
The decades of transformation witnessed within the global business world, propelled by technological advancements and subsequent consumer empowerment, may not be breaking news. Yet despite years to adapt, businesses still struggle to keep up with consumers, as expectations persistently change with the seasons.
As ever, small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) bear the brunt of constant change, given their inability to address evolving needs with the matched agility, budget and manpower of their enterprise counterparts.
Research tells us that the modern consumer expects personalisation, choice and consistency from the businesses they choose to do custom with no matter the channel of interaction. This involves being present on customers’ preferred channels, while delivering prompt and apt service across all concurrently.
The challenge this presents for SMBs is to facilitate the delivery of seamless omnichannel experiences within the confines of limited resource.
And while attempts to serve these demands manually may seem viable and affordable at face value, it costs businesses significantly in the long run.
A study conducted by Aberdeen Research found that 11% of a service employee’s time is wasted navigating between multiple applications when dealing with customer interactions, while a further 10-25% is spent searching for supporting information6. This means that, without the tools and processes to adequately support operations, striving to meet customer expectations becomes a hurdle for all parties involved.
Employees become overwhelmed and distracted by constantly changing workflows, unable to keep up with incoming demand and out of touch with the context of each interaction. And on the other hand, customers become frustrated with the lengthy wait times, only to be met with oblivious and painfully uninformed support. Without the right tools, SMBs find themselves worse off than if they didn’t pursue the needs of the modern customer at all.
Thankfully there lies some respite for SMBs to outperform and overdeliver to changing customer needs... and that opportunity lies within the wonderous world of CCaaS.
76% OF CUSTOMERS PRIORITISE CONSISTENT OMNICHANNEL EXPERIENCES WHEN DECIDING WHERE TO SHOP 4 .
75% ARE WILLING TO SPEND MORE WITH BUSINESSES THAT OFFER BETTER CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES 5 .
70% EXPECT ANYONE THEY INTERACT WITH ACROSS THE BUSINESS TO HAVE FULL CONTEXT 5 .
Whether your goal is to activate employee potential, optimise cost efficiency, or deepen your customer relationships with personalised, prompt, and relevant experiences, CCaaS can offer an indispensable helping hand.
For those not in the know, CCaaS, otherwise known as a cloud contact centre, refers to software built to support in the delivery of customer service activities. This includes arming businesses with a singular webbased platform to track and manage customer communications across voice, email, webchat and even social media, facilitating a seamless omnichannel experience.
The prospect of total streamlined communications alone presents a worthy opportunity for SMBs. Not only is it what customers expect, with 40% citing omnichannel communication as the most important aspect of a businesses’ customer service strategy, but studies also imply that, when effective, customers are likely to spend and purchase more than with those that rely on a single contact channel 7, 8 .
The value of a centralised communications hub goes far beyond gaining a single space to handle inbound interactions and in turn, offer choice, convenience and improved response times. Employees also gain access to a historic log of conversations so
they can bring crystal clear context to every interaction, proactively address outstanding issues and even personalise cross-sell or upsell recommendations. Accordingly, employees deliver laserfocused service with efficiency and ease, leaving customers feeling satisfied, acknowledged and even delighted. And to top it all off, business thrives with improved revenue retention rates, enhanced loyalty and even surges in positive reviews and referrals – all of this from just one feature!
Besides optimising communication management, CCaaS also empowers businesses with tools to demystify performance for continual, datadriven improvements. With access to comprehensive reports and insights, including average call handling time, customer satisfaction scores and call abandonment rates, businesses gain a transparent picture of operational bottlenecks and internal training needs to tackle them head on.
Despite the value presented through its omnichannel and reporting capabilities, this is barely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the possibilities experienced by businesses that adopt and embrace CCaaS. However, a lack of value is rarely the subject of debate when it comes to this technology’s place in the SMB world, but more so its suitability and viability in conjunction with a lack of budget, IT support to deploy and more.
“A cloud contact centre solution is not and never will be suitable for small to mediumsized businesses.
It’s designed to support large corporations with dedicated service teams that handle hundreds of interactions daily. Considering such a technology for smaller ventures is akin to putting out a tealight with an industrial hose pipe.”
“Call centres and contact centres are one and the same - sizable teams of moneyhungry cold callers persistently making calls until they close a sale.”
You don’t need a large business or team to require the support of a tool like CCaaS, just as a business doesn’t need to be “big” to experience unmanageable call volumes. GP surgeries are the poster child of such a scenario.
These solutions are built to scale seamlessly from as few as one user for good reason. And on top of this, CCaaS plays an invaluable role in stretching the limits of smaller budgets and team capacities through its smart tools and automations.
Wrong! A call centre typically involves a third-party team handling inbound and outbound calls on behalf of a business. Conversely, the term “contact centre” refers to a system that businesses employ to streamline communication channels and simplify service delivery.
While call centres can utilise contact centre solutions to support operations, the two are not mutually exclusive.
“Operating a cloud contact centre can strain your business. It demands a specialised team for deployment and continual maintenance, consuming significant time and money that SMBs lack to begin with.
Employees will struggle with the complex technology, resulting in wasted time and suboptimal service. In the end, the hassle will undoubtedly outweigh the benefits.”
“Contact centre solutions are typically aimed at large businesses with ample budgets to pander to over-particular customer requirements.
To add to this, the difficulty in applying these tools in practise would likely impact service negatively, incurring yet more cost to business.
For SMBs, investing in contact centre software would be like pouring money down the drain.”
Contact centre solutions are intuitive web-based platforms hosted externally, meaning your CCaaS provider of choice will undertake all specialist administrative tasks like software maintenance and security updates – so your IT team (or lack thereof) don’t have to.
No pricey or intricate hardware is required to deploy, just a device and internet connection. Plus, when logged into the management-level portal, designated employees can easily manage automations, user assignments, and more with a simple click.
According to Accenture, transitioning to a cloud contact centre can save businesses up to 35% alone in operational costs16. Then, combined with the opportunity to effectively manage churn, while delivering focused cross-sell and upsell recommendations, CCaaS solutions practically pay for themselves.
If that wasn’t convincing enough, these solutions are packaged as a per-month, per-user fee, meaning you only ever pay for what you need.
In the business of social housing, success entails much more than the rolling of dice on a Monopoly board. Even recently, the challenges faced by an already strained sector were ramped up significantly by action from the UK government.
2022 witnessed the implementation of tenant satisfaction measures for the regulation of social housing, presenting a novel method for benchmarking the standard of homes and service provided across England9. These new obligations include handling and completing repairs within an appropriate timescale, promptly and fairly addressing complaints, alongside ensuring effective communication channels are in place to keep tenants well-informed and connected.
While this initiative aims to safeguard social tenants, the pressure is very much on for associations to further stretch their limited resource to deliver the expected level of care. And when considering the concentration of vulnerability within the social housing population, it’s clear landlords have a duty of care to strengthen their service, regardless of the barriers they face10. With contact centre technology, improved service only solves the barriers and constraints felt by associations.
Like many, the sector faces notoriously high call volumes, spanning from maintenance requests to complaints, which inflicts a large level of strain on personnel, especially considering the newly imposed measures. While CCaaS can’t clone employees for boosted manpower, what it can do is connect businesses with omnichannel service capabilities to reduce the manual intervention needed within interactions
through use of digital channels and automations. By offering multiple methods of communication, from voice to email to webchat, landlords can ease the traffic and impact of inbound voice calls and instead, delegate basic or common queries to self-service channels.
With one platform to manage all interactions, CCaaS makes it easier to track and record tenant requests, no matter the platform and in turn, will help in monitoring and proactively chasing progress on outstanding cases. Empowered with a seamless omnichannel experience, landlords can enhance accessibility to support, while minimising the impact that would otherwise be felt.
While inbound calls will never be fully eliminated due to their distinctive human quality, associations and landlords can make use of powerful automations provided by CCaaS to intuitively prioritise inbound call traffic in favour of targeted customer groups. Tools like criteria-based routing can be used to award the most vulnerable tenants with priority access to support, jumping the queue when alongside other inbound queries. As a result, associations can more appropriately tend to their call volume, while both tenants and landlords have peace of mind their service is easily and quickly accessible to those that need it most.
A tool as rich as CCaaS encourages businesses to dream and achieve big, without having to be big. Smallersized ventures still face the pressure of delivering, while grappling with the challenge of limited resource and a degree of flexibility required to react to evolving internal and external demand. Though when paired with a CCaaS platform, SMBs can stretch their time, money and manpower far beyond its usual confines.
Alongside being easy to adopt and deploy, the web-based nature of cloud contact centres makes them extremely flexible and easy to scale, as and when it suits. Whether it’s to accommodate new starters or adjust to seasonal demand, those with access to the administrator portal can add, assign and remove contact centre licenses in a matter of minutes.
This equips businesses with the agility to respond promptly and effectively without the intervention or costs associated with specialist support. Moreover, the subscription model of CCaaS solutions ensures businesses only pay for the services they need. All in all, the seamless scalability enabled promotes cost-efficiency; while facilitating real-time reaction to change so service and budget are always under control.
Unlike traditional alternatives, cloudbased contact centres consist of userfriendly web-based platforms that remove the need for taxing hardware. Accordingly, deploying and adopting CCaaS solutions becomes a simple task that can be coordinated by anyone, no matter their level of specialist knowledge.
This prospect alone opens a myriad of doors for SMBs to rival with the customer-centricity of their larger counterparts. With just a device and internet connection, small businesses can be up and running with a fully operational solution, while the more arduous tasks of updating and maintaining the system are delegated to the chosen provider. This development in contact centre technology means greater accessibility to invaluable customer service tools, without the cost and IT dependency once associated.
With just an internet connection needed to tune in, cloud-based contact centres can offer untold peace of mind and security for those that rely on a fixed premises to carry out business. There will always be the possibility that the unexpected happens, whether it’s the result of adverse weather conditions or a burst pipe that restricts your premises from being accessible. What can be controlled, however, are the disaster recovery measures put in place to mitigate impact.
Even in the face of disaster, consumers expect their demands to be met with speed and accuracy. Therefore, CCaaS solutions provide crucial continuity assurance for businesses to safeguard their service without impact to call quality, customer satisfaction or even revenue. All businesses must do is connect at an alternative workable location and service can continue to play out uninterrupted.
When service is delivered to or beyond the standard, everyone wins. Customers leave interactions feeling delighted, excited to engage with their product or service and willing to share their experience. Employees deal with pleasant, patient customers that make their job feel rewarding and fulfilling, increasing pride and accountability. As a result, business experiences exponential revenue retention rates, strengthened brand sentiment and even benefits from an influx of new business from positive reviews and referrals.
As a solution built to primarily aid and enhance customer service activity, businesses can expect the above and more when adopting CCaaS. Through its omnichannel capability, intelligent automations and rich real-time insights, service becomes more contextual, efficient and effective, while eating away at less budget, time and intervention to fulfil.
In the post-pandemic era, the opportunity for flexible working remains a favourable, if not demanded, employment benefit – and it’s no wonder why. Studies show the initiative to be a success, making way for improved work-life balance, faster task completion and fewer distractions11. This flexibility, however, hasn’t always been granted easily to customer-facing personnel. Managers require visibility of taskforce availability and output, while employees rely on access to office-based technology and support to fulfil their role. As ever, CCaaS paves the way of possibility.
With its remote access and comprehensive insights combined, CCaaS enables employees to deliver high quality service no matter their location, while giving managers the visibility needed to monitor, measure and engage their hybrid workforce. In addition, businesses that embrace such technology expand their horizons when it comes to talent acquisition. By complementing operations with tools to facilitate flexibility, businesses can expand their reach to a larger talent pool going far beyond the confines of their immediate location.
For those in the business of Professional Services, the experience delivered sells the ability to also deliver in the specialised knowledge or skill. As service is in the name, it is crucial for service-based businesses to excel in their experience to instil confidence in clients and win their business.
Whether in the field of finance, legal or even architecture, service expectations are largely universal. Clients expect a sound understanding of their needs, transparent and responsive communications, and above all else, their expectations delivered with precision.
According to a recent publication by Wrike, one of the key barriers to effective project or case delivery faced by the industry is, ironically, the client. It is said that up to 97% of teams experience delays as a result of changing scopes and expectations12. And so, this presents a worthy question: How can businesses stand a chance to deliver when the client themselves become their biggest blocker?
While no technology in the world can contain the colourful imagination of
customers and clients, what businesses can do is employ tools to facilitate enhanced visibility and flexibility when curveballs do arise, so they can react with fluidity. In the case of CCaaS, omnichannel communications presents a valuable opportunity. With one platform as a firm’s source of truth, representatives across the business can access historic client conversations to gain clear context of changing needs, so they’re always informed and on target.
By consolidating communication channels, from voice to webchat conversations, professionals can also more easily monitor outbound updates and chase progress on outstanding tasks. This alone offers a variety of channels to keep close contact with clients, while increasing the visibility of service delivered and the level of proactivity achieved in fulfilling projects and cases.
As a result, professional services businesses diminish the strain of evolving scopes, while presenting themselves as the experts of effortless service that they truly are.
Your employees shape the foundation of your customer experience. Their strength and ability reflecting your businesses’ and brand’s eligibility of custom. But the delivery of your experience can’t be preserved by their talent and commitment alone.
After all, human resource is a finite asset, easily affected by its environment and therefore, requires great care to ensure continual positive output. Businesses would benefit greatly from solutions that can optimise workload and operation to protect employee sentiment, while easing the burden of service delivery. With its host of features and benefits, cloud contact centres plan a key role in achieving the optimal experience, where customer and employee satisfaction levels overlap.
Navigating real-time customer interactions can be challenging for frontline employees, but in the thick of unchartered waters is where some of the most valuable learning opportunities lie. Without the right support however, these situations can have significant repercussions for both the customer and employee experiences.
Armed with CCaaS, businesses can empower their workforce with engaging and fulfilling upskilling opportunities without the risk to service. Call Whispering enables managers to shadow less experienced employees amidst real-time calls, providing frictionless and discreet coaching as they navigate complex or unfamiliar queries, without the customer’s awareness. As a result, CCaaS directly removes barriers to learning, builds confidence when confronting novel queries, and ensures consistency across the board, leading to better service and satisfaction for all parties.
Without access to insights, navigating service can be an overwhelming and thankless task. Your teams aspire to progress, yet lack the clarity needed to focus efforts and make meaningful improvements. And so, your business remains stuck in a cycle of guesswork that costs resource without the promise of any notable results.
With one unified platform to track and manage omnichannel customer communications, CCaaS connects businesses with valuable insights into service quality, performance, and customer satisfaction. By leveraging its comprehensive reports, identifying key bottlenecks and responding with targeted training programs becomes a simple and effective. As a result, teams become more proactive in addressing service pitfalls, while fostering valuable opportunities for growth.
In 2022, IBN revealed that a staggering 75% of support calls involve timeconsuming searches for information13. In contrast, 70% of customers expect anyone they interact with across a business to have full context of their unique situation5. These figures show a concerning gap between business capability and customer expectations. However, businesses must adapt if they’re to win their custom.
In service, time spent searching for context causes a significant ripple effect, starting with increased call handling times and ending with customers that feel like a number. Neither of which do any good for productivity or morale on either side.
Another victim is your call queue. While your service employees scour for information needed to support their current query, customers still in the queue face prolonged, frustrating waiting times, just to be met with equally laborious service. By streamlining communications into one easily accessible space, CCaaS facilitates the delivery of a universal experience, no matter the employee or department handling any given interaction. This solution consolidates historic interaction logs and customer information, minimising the time and effort needed to understand the full picture, while paving the way for opportunities to proactively address outstanding issues and personalise purchase recommendations for an unmatched level of service.
When employees feel engaged and accountable, they take pride in the level of service they deliver, making everyone a winner. The live data and wallboard feature accessible through CCaaS gives managers an effective visual aid to foster just that into any team and culture. Having key metrics visible in the workplace will raise awareness of realtime performance, keeping employees connected to their targets, focused and accountable.
With support of a contact centre solution, employees of all levels receive the support they need to activate their full potential, and with that, superior customer service follows suit.
Observational studies conducted worldwide indicate that approximately 30-50% of healthcare professionals have encountered work-related stress or burnout within the past three years. A notable 37% reporting that stress levels were significantly hindered by disjointed IT and data sharing systems, adding to the complexities of an already strenuous line of work14.
However, it’s not just healthcare professionals who are feeling the repercussions. A survey conducted by the Patient’s Association revealed that 55% of patients have experienced poor communication from the NHS in the past five years, with one in ten stating that their care has been adversely affected as a result15.
the flow of interactions into one, easily managed space. This alone can reduce phone line congestion significantly by utilising digital methods to manage routine queries from subscription ordering to appointment booking. By embracing modern contact methods like webchat, surgeries can enhance their responsiveness and access to support, freeing up time for receptionists to deliver quality care to those that need it most.
The daunting reality of these statistics? The higher the barriers to care, the lower the confidence of patients and therefore, the lower the likelihood of professional help being sought when its needed. To mitigate this growing issue, finding a suitable and affordable solution fit for healthcare practices is paramount. To the relief of patients and providers worldwide, CCaaS offers an accessible pathway to robust communications for all.
The NHS are notoriously strained by unmanageable influxes of demand, particularly concentrated at certain times of the day. Not only does this mount pressure on receptionists as they manually tend to each call, but it also becomes a worry for patients in need of same-day care. In this instance, omnichannel service enabled by CCaaS is a valuable solution for both parties.
In the world of healthcare, omnichannel service entails facilitating multiple methods of inbound patient communications, while consolidating
Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) is another invaluable tool for managing the allocation of priority care and resource. With a simple automation, a surgery’s system can prioritise inbound calls from specific patient groups, for example those over the age of 70, so they can be fast-tracked to the front of the call queue for expedited support.
When in the business of care, ensuring compliance is a vital but nonetheless challenging exercise when paired with limited resources. With the support of a contact centre, practices can easily and effectively establish procedures for monitoring and auditing the patient experience, safeguarding both parties. CCaaS connects healthcare surgeries with a host of tools including call recording and automatic patient feedback surveys to ensure consistent and adequate service quality is met. With CCaaS, it’s clear a better healthcare experience is easily accessible for all.
From the world of healthcare to professional services and beyond, CCaaS has a wealth of value to offer small to medium-sized businesses, if only they look beyond the myths and misconceptions woven over time.
Quality of service and experience no longer need to be restrained by the confines of small budgets, time and human resource. Instead, contact centre solutions pave the way for a new age of SMB empowerment, where they can compete with the volatility of the modern consumer and the clout of their enterprise counterparts.
Paired with our progression customer service technology, your business can achieve:
• Lasting customer relationships.
• High performing employees.
• Secure revenue retention rates.
• Outstanding service, anywhere.
Discover the possibilities of our contact centre software with our datasheet below.
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1. 1 Genesys, 2024. “The state of customer experience”. https://www.genesys.com/resources/state-of-cx
2. Customer Think, 2020. “How to exceed customer expectations with omnichannel strategies”. https://customerthink.com/how-to-exceedcustomer-expectations-with-omnichannel-strategies/
3. CX Today, 2019. “Delivering an excellent omni-channel experience”. https://www.cxtoday.com/contact-centre/delivering-an-excellentomni-channel-experience/
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9. Regulator of Social Housing, 2022. “Tenant Satisfaction Measures – Summary of RSH Requirements (accessible)”. https://www.gov.uk/ government/consultations/consultation-on-the-introduction-of-tenant-satisfaction-measures/outcome/tenant-satisfaction-measuressummary-of-rsh-requirements-accessible
10. Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities, 2023. “National Statistics. English Housing Survey 2021 to 2022: social rented sector”. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/english-housing-survey-2021-to-2022-social-rented-sector/english-housingsurvey-2021-to-2022-social-rented-sector
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