We continue on today from last week in discussions around Cloud Services and some of how that relates to Contact Centres
What’s in a name? Software as a Service or SAAS
SalesForce – one of the largest providers of SAAS defines it this way…
“Software as a service is a way of delivering centrally hosted applications over the internet as a service. SaaS applications are sometimes known by other names:
- Web-based software
- On-demand software
- Hosted software
According to TechTarget, “In the software on demand SaaS model, the provider gives customers network-based access to a single copy of an application that the provider created specifically for SaaS distribution.” This application runs on the SaaS provider’s servers, freeing the software’s users from a number of responsibilities.” 1.
Software-as-a-Service is accessed through your web browser with a URL, with you logging onto the application using a username and password. As discussed last week, the advantages are many as you have access to the information on a variety of devices across multiple operating system platforms.
As an example …. you have your iPhone, a Microsoft surface tablet, and Kindle device. Those operating systems are all different in the back end and have proprietary software and hardware designs to each of those organizations. However if you log into the YouTube app, loaded on all those devices, and use with your name and password, your experience of YouTube is ostensibly the same. YouTube is a SAAS application that you have access to – because no one but a huge provider could support the server farm that houses all those billions of videos!!
21 years ago this year, the first Cloud Based Contact Centre was born.
Based on the Mordor Intelligence folks, the cloud-based contact center market was valued at 161 million USD in 2020, and it is expected to reach 518 million USD by 2026, – a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 21.8% over the forecast measured period of 2021 – 2026. 2
A Contact centre, is a big catch all for all kinds of information flows. Back in the day we have all called into an 800 number and either been answered directly or been walked though a push 1 or 2 scenario.
But today, there are many ways to communicate with a company’s contact centre whether it be through SMS, text, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram Readit – you get the idea.
With the onset of extreme global change around COVID last year, companies were quickly pushed to adapt and overcome. When a large contingent of services went to a work from home environment, banks, retail, health care, media and even entertainment changed the business model in order to maintain some semblance of their business frameworks.
A contact centre is about communication but not all that communication is verbal – it could be via email, text, or even through payment systems. It’s model is very similar to the famous original model of FedEx’s hub and spoke – incorporated in October of 1997.
At FedEx, everything is shipped into a central place for sorting and then sent back out in the best mode possible to achieve customer satisfaction and timely service.
At a Contact Centre, all bookings, issues, complaints, and revenue flow in through one central repository. The contact centre then deals with what is presented and ensures that the customer has a satisfactory resolution.
We all are only guessing as to what expanded the future of this means – but I suggest that society will not go back to pre COVID forms of fractured communications – some of those ways are thankfully broken and there isn’t a good reason not to take the teachings of the last year and a half and incorporate them into stronger more viable ways of communicating with contact centres globally through the cloud.
That’s all for today – join us next week when we discuss how to keep all these cloud services fully redundant and ready for almost any emergency – or what we like to call Continuation of Business.
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