Let’s talk a little bit today about ‘Next Gen Customer Experience’ offerings.
There are over 20 CCAAS providers in the market today. CCAAS stands for Contact Center as a Service. Talkdesk is a good example and representative of our industry today. Gartner rates them in the leaders quadrant along with NICE/InContact and Genesys. Five 9’s and 8x8 are also gaining in this market.
These CCAAS providers can deliver customer experience/interaction solutions for businesses, empowering Voice, Chat, SMS, Email, Video, Omni Channel, etc. interactions and WFO (Workflow optimization tools) in a subscription model. Today our industry is representing OpEx subscription as the recommended way to invest in these more sophisticated/evolving technologies. And in many cases, we don’t disagree with that recommendation.
By utilizing an OTT (Over the Top) contact center service, that usually delivers services that requires no customer provided server infrastructure to support it, and it usually means integrations are simpler to bring to market, without large CapEx investments, etc.
These CCAAS solutions, while powerful applications, are not inexpensive. Its common place for the per agent pricing to be $50-$200/per month per agent, plus an onboarding/upfront cost for programming, integration & setup.
Mitel is about to release a next generation offering called Mitel One CX. This is an integrated and higher end contact center experience available on MiCloud Connect. Mitel also recently announced a partnership with Five 9’s. That partnership makes sense when you now recognize all of the other major CCAAS providers are rolling out a UCAAS offering.
The bottom line is this – there are a lot of options out there and finding the perfect fit for your company requires looking at what you have, discovering how you see your customer experience and understanding what budget restraints may exist.
Our account management team at Unified can evaluate cloud offerings like TalkDesk, InContact, Five 9’s and Genesys. Further, we have the ability to deliver enhanced feature and functionality leveraging assets companies may already own. In order to recommend the perfect solution, it’s important that we understand how each company manages their customer experience (Contact Center).
Our team can help you evaluate and design, as well as compare options that provide a customer experience that makes business sense and financial sense for your company.
