Chapter 2: Understanding CCaaS Components

At the core of a CCaaS solution is its ability to facilitate multichannel communication, enabling organisations to engage with customers through various channels like voice calls, email, webchat, social media, and SMS. This ensures that customers can choose the channel that best suits their preferences and needs while allowing businesses to deliver seamless and consistent experiences across all touchpoints.

Here is an overview of the fundamental components of a CCaaS solution.

Omnichannel

  • Voice
  • Email
  • Social Media
  • Chat
  • Channel Routing system

Channel Management

  • Website user behaviour
  • Dynamic banners
  • Contextual routing
  • Chat banner control

Self-Service

  • Chatbot
  • Voicebot
  • Consumer Knowledgebase

Agent Experience

  • Agent application
  • Knowledgebase
  • Bot support

Quality Management

  • Quality Assurance

Customer Insights

  • Customer Survey
  • Feedback analysis

Contact Centre Performance

  • KPIs monitoring
  • Agent performance

Agent Scheduling

  • Workforce Management

Learn the lingo: CCaaS definitions

So, you now know the definition of CCaaS and the core components but watch out, they’re are lots of other acronyms and industry buzzwords. Keep reading and learn all the CCaaS definitions and buzzwords you need to know.

What does AHT mean?
Average Handling Time is the average duration of a customer interaction, including talk time, hold time and wrap-up time. It is commonly used to measure the efficiency of individual agents and wider service teams. ​

What is AI?
Artificial Intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence in machines. In the contact centre, AI is often used to engage customers, perform simple service tasks and guide agents through difficult interactions.​

What is a bot?
Bots are automated computer programs designed to perform simple, repetitive tasks. Chatbots that simulate human conversation can help customers self-service without the need for a human agent.​

What does call blending mean?
Call Blending is a feature that allows contact centre agents to receive inbound calls and make outbound calls without manually switching settings.​

What does call recording mean?
Call recording refers to the recording and storing of customer calls. Call recordings are often used for quality monitoring and training purposes.​

What does CRM mean?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a type of software used by businesses to organise their customer information, activities, and interactions, with two major examples being Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.​

What does CX mean?
CX stands for Customer Experience. It describes the overall look, feel and quality of a brand’s interactions with a customer.​

What does EI mean?
EI stands for Emotional Intelligence. It describes a person’s ability to perceive, control, and express their emotions, as well as manage relationships.​

What does EX mean?
EX stands for Employee Experience, which refers to the overall look, feel and quality of an employee’s interactions with a company at every point within their career or tenure, from recruitment to retirement.​

What are integrations?
Integrations are applications that can be merged and work harmoniously with other applications. Puzzel can integrate with CRM systems, speech recognition engines and dozens of other third-party applications.​

What is an IVR?
VR stands for Interactive Voice Response. It is a telephony menu system that uses customer feedback to automatically route inbound calls to the most skilled and relevant department to handle their enquiry.​

What are native cloud solutions?
Native cloud solutions are designed for the cloud from day one.​

What does NSP mean?
NSP stands for Network Service Provider. These providers sell bandwidth or network access for internet users.​

What is an NPS?
NPS also stands for Net Promoter Score. This metric measures the net proportion of customers who are willing to recommend a company, a product, or a service. It is measured between –100 and 100 and is used by businesses to assess their overall customer satisfaction.​

What does omnichannel mean?
Omnichannel contact centres provide seamless customer service across multiple channels. For example, customers can choose to make an enquiry via email and then continue with that enquiry on social media or on the phone. Most omnichannel contact centres offer service across voice, email, web chat, social and SMS.​

What is silent monitoring?
Silent monitoring enables contact centre supervisors to listen in on conversations between callers and agents. It is often used for quality management and training purposes. ​

What is skills-based routing?
Skills-based routing ensures customers are assigned to the first available agent with the highest skills to handle their enquiries every time.​

What is TX?
TX stands for Total Experience. It refers to the all-round experience of your brand from the point of view of your customers, users, and employees.​

What is WFM?
WFM stands for Workforce Management. It is a type of software that enables organisations to optimise their staff working schedules by using historical data to forecast demand and then assign staff to tasks and shifts accordingly.

What is Ticketing?
Ticketing systems streamline communications between customers and contact centre agents by automatically prioritising, tracking, tagging, and assigning interactions.​

What does AX mean?
Agent Experience (AX) is to your contact centre agents what CX is to your customers: a measure of how happy they are with your business and how well you’re serving them. When you give your agents all the tools they need to deliver exceptional customer service – that’s good AX. When chatbots take care of simple and repetitive requests, freeing your people to focus on the most important interactions – that’s good AX. When you empower your agents to be their helpful, empathetic, human selves (whether they’re in the office or at home) – that’s good AX because the best AX means getting the balance right between technology and people: combining best-practice automation and AI with empowered and empathetic agents.

What does EWT mean?
EWT or Expected Wait Time is the approximate waiting time, which is informed to a customer before they are connected to an associate.

What is self-Service?
Self-Service is a proactive support for customers who would want to find the solution to their problem by themselves rather than getting into an interacting with an associate.

What do digital channels mean?
Digital channels are generally email, chat, text (SMS), social media, etc.

What is a customer journey?
Customer Journey, as the term suggests, is the complete journey and experience of a customer when interacting with a brand.

What does CSAT mean?
CSAT, otherwise known as Customer Satisfaction, is a score to measure the level of satisfaction of a customer when it comes to transactions or interactions with the brand.

What does a contact centre agent do?
Typically, the contact centre agent’s duties and responsibilities include handling phone calls, emails, chat messages, SMS, and support tickets for companies. The nature of the calls and messages agents handle can vary from perhaps simple bill payments and order inquiries to complex support questions and complaints. A contact centre agent is generally responsible for handling many inquiries each day.  

What is sentiment analysis?
Sentiment Analysis enables contact centre agents to measure and track customer happiness during service interactions. Sometimes referred to as opinion mining, Sentiment Analysis works by quietly analysing conversations in real-time, picking up emotional cues from the customer’s natural language to determine if they are feeling positive, negative, or neutral. This not only helps agents to better attend to customers’ emotive needs but also to determine the next best action to achieve maximum customer satisfaction. 

What is intelligent routing?
Intelligent Routing, also known as Skills-based Routing, is a technology to gather customer inquiries through voice, digital, or social channels and then applies rules to route the inquiry to the best-skilled agent to resolve the issue for FCR. Intelligent Routing increases customer satisfaction by reducing back-and-forth interactions when a customer is transferred or put on hold, which decreases the average handle time (AHT).  

What is call transcription?
Transcription helps by delivering quality customer service by gaining insight into past customer interactions happening on a voice channel. This is indeed an important and powerful tool for any business that aims to elevate its service levels by providing accessibility to past customer conversations that facilitates an improved understanding of the customer.  The Voice transcription feature will transcribe all recorded voice calls and create transcriptions automatically that will be made available to the agents within Agent Assist via interaction history. Before being served to the agents, the transcriptions are subjected to analysis for the purposes of extracting relevant topics or keywords and then automatically tagged with conversations. This aids Agent Assist in suggesting relevant topics to the agents based on historical conversations.