CCaaS as the Next Step for Your Business
Many businesses adjacent to the contact center, e.g. service providers of UCaaS, CPaaS, SIP trunks and hosted telephony, are looking to expand their range of services by providing CCaaS to end-user customers, embracing the flexibility and extensibility of a cloud-based service model.
If that’s you, choose your platform carefully.
Effective, large scale CCaaS cannot be delivered successfully by a reheated on-premise solution. And, it’s no small task to build your own complex solution from a toolbox of components.
To be able to deliver everything expected of an enterprise-scale CCaaS platform, it must be cloud-native – designed and built from the ground up to be hosted and delivered in the cloud. And that brings with it several design challenges.
Here are 6 essential questions that you should ask vendors before spending any money:

1. What is the platform’s approach to extensibility?
Every contact center has unique requirements and particular skills necessary to manage them. Not every service provider or end user has those skills. This introduces the risk of misconfiguration and less-than-reliable 3rd party integrations. To cope with this ‘everything-is-a-request’ instability, the available APIs must be comprehensive, coherent and designed to operate at the core of the product.
2. How easy is it to provision new tenants/ media services?
SIP infrastructure and functionality is a complex, specialised area. Any CCaaS platform must simplify and optimise the process of provisioning both new tenants and media services for the end user, preferably using its own orchestration infrastructure.
3. How easy is it to manage the platform?
Fast troubleshooting of environmental and other issues can only occur with the right diagnostic and management tools. The management interface for a feature-rich cloud contact center platform must be unified, web-based, intuitive and foolproof.
4. How expensive is the platform to run?
A full-scale cloud contact center stack has many components running processes concurrently. This can make huge demands on memory and server resources. It is vital that the platform costs for cloud storage, database I/O and services are kept as low as possible, e.g. by using ‘on demand’ rather than ‘always on‘ resources.
5. Does performance take a hit when we scale up?
Managing agent resources across many queues and many media channels is a tough challenge. Doing it effectively at scale in the cloud is tougher still. What worked fine with 25 agents may no longer work for 250. The problem requires rethinking the traditional ACD to cope efficiently with the challenges introduced by omnichannel and multiple concurrent sessions.
6. What happens when things go wrong?
Perish the thought! Yes, there are many instabilities in the cloud that are not a concern for on-premise solutions. The platform must have measures in place to protect the contact center software infrastructure from misconfiguration, poorly-designed integrations, database logjam and software defects.
If the other vendors you speak to do not have satisfactory answers to these questions, come and ask Sytel. Our CCaaS platform is designed to meet these challenges head on.
To find out more about Sytel’s CCaaS platform, or to book a demo, just talk to us.