As cloud adoption reaches an all-time high, more and more business functions are demanding functionality from the technology stacks. Whether you are a call centre, full blown contact centre or business unit that requires inbound or multichannel functionality, the Contact Centre as-a-Service (CCaaS) market is where you need to be looking.
The market is built up of inbound specialists, voice-first companies and software houses that each offer something different. It can be a minefield when breaking down who to even approach. And that needs to happen a long time before you start seeing demos and producing requirements.
This guide highlights the contact centre companies in the CCaaS industry and should be used to help narrow your search in finding the perfect match for your contact centre needs.
Enghouse Interactive
Enghouse Interactive provides an omni-channel contact centre solution providing voice, email, webchat and social media channels all into a single pane of glass.
With Enghouse Interactive, we also see the addition of chatbots into the contact centre. As businesses compete to provide standout customer experience at all hours of the day, the focus on getting your chatbot right first time is crucial. Enghouse Interactive has a refreshing view that your chatbot needs to be treated like a human. It may not need a lunch break, but it does need dependable data to draw from and updating when changes are made to systems, products and processes.
Enghouse Interactive is a certified partner of Cisco, NEC and Avaya. You should expect integration between phone system and contact centre to be top rate when combining with one of these partners.
Enghouse Interactive’s most interesting partner is Microsoft Skype for Business. As businesses rely on Skype for Business, and soon to be superseded by Microsoft Teams, the need to integrate your Microsoft phone system into your contact centre becomes crucial. When buying a contact centre for Skype for Business, consider Enghouse Interactive as a native partner.
Five9
Five9 has been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Centre-as-a-Service 4 years in a row now. They also appear in the latest Forrester Wave Cloud Contact Centre report so you instantly know they have a solution worth reviewing.
Like Enghouse Interactive, Five9 provides an omni-channel solution delivered to a single agent experience. In addition, Five9 includes a Workforce Optimisation suite and predictive dialler as part of their all-in-one contact centre solution.
Five9 has recently seen an influx of former Cisco C-level hirings. These make complete sense as Five9 looks to dominate the artificial intelligence part of the contact centre market. Five9 CEO, Rowan Trollope, recently announced the partnership with Google Cloud Contact Center AI. He said:
“Imagine a customer engaging with an intelligent virtual agent, that talks to them in a natural and human way, finding them what they need and connecting them to a human agent. The human agent will then be guided by artificial intelligence to ensure they get to the best possible answer as quickly as possible. The result? A radical customer experience every time”.
8x8
As with Enghouse Interactive and Five9, 8x8 provides an omni-channel contact centre experience, bringing in channels like voice, email and web chat into a single pane of glass. Unlike Enghouse Interactive and Five9, however, 8x8 also provides their UCaaS offering via the same platform.
This makes the 8x8 X Series contact centre platform incredibly attractive to highly collaborative contact centre users that require constant communication with other teams that don’t use the contact centre platform. Enabling both contact centre and non-contact centre users to channel their comms through the same medium is a real win for user experience. If your teams feel comfortable and can be more productive in the tools they use, the correlating customer experience will only prosper.
This also ties in the important aspect of cost. Typically, a contact centre platform is deployed in conjunction with a separate phone system. This incurs calls between platforms – for example, 8x8 contact centre to Avaya phone system. With everything operating under one platform, the cost benefits associated with deploying 8x8 as a contact centre must be heavily considered if looking for a new phone system at the same time.
VoIP Studio
VoIP Studio provides a call centre product specifically designed for small businesses looking to enhance their CRM applications and get intelligent inbound functionality without the expenditure of a full blown omni-channel solution.
Suited more to businesses handling high volumes of calls, rather than high volumes of tweets, VoIP Studio enables the following features from just £3.99 per month:
- Reception console for simple management of call flows, users and administration
- Unlimited call recording for compliance, regulation and training
- ACD Queues, ring groups, IVR and time-based routing all provided
- Wallboard and CRM integration backed by 24/7 technical support
They even tie in a free non-geographical number, free number porting and free inbound calls. If your business is looking for inbound contact centre functionality, at a fraction of the cost, VoIP Studio must be considered. For those really just dipping their toe in the contact centre market, you can even get a free 30 day trial to test whether it’s call centre functionality you need or a bells and whistles omni-channel solution.
Tollring
Tollring is probably best known for providing wallboard and customer analytics on cloud phone system platforms. Commonly coupled with BroadSoft phone systems (and a good number of other leading UCaaS platforms), Tollring made its name providing deep insights into inbound voice transactions. Aside from business analytics into VoIP and UC platforms, Tollring also provides their informal contact centre product, iCall Suite.
iCall Suite can be deployed via cloud, hybrid and on-premises mediums and is broken down into the following feature sets:
- iCS Insight: provides an at-a-glance dashboard of inbound activity
- iCS Report: provides historical enhanced level reporting, breaking down each call, trends and patterns during the working day
- iCS Report Premier: provides enhanced level reporting in real-time
- iCS Record: compliant call recording and quality management
- iCS Protect: fraud and credit management and prevention
Tollring also provides telecoms expense management and billing solutions.
West UC
West UC’s portfolio is based off the back of two major acquisitions. Their acquisition of InterCall boosted their UCaaS platform and their acquisition of contact centre provider, Magnetic North, forms the basis of their CCaaS offering.
West UC has two core CCaaS products. The first is their Inbound Cloud Contact Centre. This comes pre-packaged with intelligent call routing, interactive voice response (IVR), call queue management, dynamic scripting and a selection of customisable reports and dashboards.
Avaya’s CCaaS product has arrived to market quickly following their legacy success in the on-premises phone system and contact centre markets. The solution now boasts omni-channel functionality, dynamic workspaces for customer interactions and machine learning to power the best possible outcomes for your customers.
Akixi provides cloud based call analytics that give businesses valuable insight into their voice transactions. With Akixi, you can benefit from over 200 historical and real-time reports, fully customisable on your own dashboard.
Following Cisco’s acquisition of BroadSoft last year, the CCaaS offering takes the shape of the Cisco Customer Journey Platform. BroadSoft’s own acquisition of Transera empowered BroadSoft with an omni-channel cloud contact centre platform to be sold into their existing customer base.
Twilio is a Communications Platform as-a-Service platform (CPaaS) rather than pure CCaaS. This will likely appeal to more developer focused businesses that require reactive change and ultimate flexibility.
RingCentral Engage is an omni-channel contact centre solution connecting your business with customers on their channel of choice. Through RingCentral’s recent acquisition of customer engagement business, Dimelo, businesses can now truly serve their customers on their preferred medium – not just the ones available in a standard contact centre scenario.
