Vasili Triant Debunks 5 Common Myths About CCaaS Technology

Cloud-based CCaaS systems have rapidly outpaced legacy call centers in growth and popularity, and with good reason. They have the capability to dramatically streamline the customer experience and improve ease-of-use for agents and customers alike. 

But not all CCaaS systems are created equal, and not all brand leaders fully understand them. 

When it comes to cloud contact centers as a service, there’s a plethora of misinformation out there to sift through. In a recent episode of Punk CX, Vasili Triant, COO of UJET, busted some of the most common myths about CCaaS and CX. 

Myth: All CCaaS systems have unlimited uptime and reliable support. 

Even though modern CCaaS systems are miles above previous call center technology, they are not infallible, in fact, many don’t have the support required to keep a brand’s tech in operational order 24/7. 

As brands load more software onto cloud call center tech, downtime becomes more common. Some CCaaS providers will promise customers 100% uptime, but these “promises” often come with fine print.

Some providers, for example, won’t fix issues that are related to infrastructure if something goes wrong with it. And even a small amount of downtime can have disastrous consequences for your organization – a one-hour outage could cost nearly half a million dollars in lost revenue and productivity.

(Looking for a true 100% uptime guarantee? Check out CX Intercloud, which snagged UJET the 2022 Best of Enterprise Connect overall distinction.) 

Myth: All CCaaS systems have infinite scale. 

The main draw of cloud infrastructure providers is that their scale is elastic, and it is. They can scale, but most can only scale to a certain point. 

When there’s too much going on in a given system, vendors have to start clustering systems for more scale, and in the cloud space, this scaling happens at a smaller level than in off-cloud software. 

Companies might hit 500 users, 1,500 users, or 2,000, for example, before clustering starts happening, and the issue with clustering is that it can create disparity in reporting and administration challenges. As businesses scale and start clustering, it can also start a domino effect that further deepens a system’s reliability issues. 

The important thing to note is that for CCaaS, elasticity in infrastructure does not equal elasticity within the software itself. 

UJET's CX Intercloud is a true outlier when it comes to resilience and reliability. Simultaneous configuration across AWS and GCP delivers unprecedented resiliency, business continuity, and disaster recovery readiness, with a true 100% uptime guarantee.

Myth: Every system that claims to have AI is an intelligent, innovative system. 

When it comes to the customer experience, artificial intelligence (AI) is too often used as a marketing buzzword tacked onto a system to attract customers rather than an accurate description of a CCaaS system’s tech and outcomes. According to Triant, 95% of the time, CCaaS companies are attaching AI to their name, but there’s nothing different in their technology than automation technology that has existed for the last 5-8 years. It isn’t innovative. It isn’t new. 

A brand using the term AI doesn’t ultimately matter. What matters is if providers are putting technology into their systems that have benefits in the backend. Is a system capable of learning and adapting? Are you enhancing your customer’s experience with AI or making it more cumbersome? These are things brands should be asking. 

Myth: Virtual agents always give brands amazing ROI. 

Virtual agents are a hot commodity in the CCaaS space, but what may come as a surprise to many brands is there is no proof that most of these virtual agents give back amazing ROI. The reason why so many don’t is they’re being used as a bandaid rather than actually improving the experience.

Most virtual agent providers are trying to sell VA technology without actually changing the customer experience for the better. Chatbots, for example, are frequently used not to make finding resolutions easier for the customer, but to deflect customer interactions by adding too many extra steps. This can frustrate a customer into calling into your business and taking frustrations out on your agents or never interacting with your business again. 

Intelligent virtual agents, like those designed by UJET, change the experience for the better by going beyond providing canned responses. They’re leveraging machine learning to give customers a more natural, human-like experience. They’re eliminating extra steps and repetition so that when customers need to transfer between a VA and a live agent, no context is lost. 

Myth: Not all CCaaS systems on the market are true cloud software. 

In the CCaaS world, there are a lot of buzzwords like “AI” being used to package a system as modern cloud software. Cloud technologies are supposed to be better than on-premises technologies because of the time to market and ability to deploy software in real-time, but many are using the same exact technology as on-premises centers. 

It’s important to look out for buzzwords like “containerization” and “microservices,” which might make a system sound modern, and ask specific questions like “how often do you deploy software.” Agile, modern services will release software every 2-3 weeks. If a system releases software at less frequent intervals than that, it may not have the capabilities you want in a powerful contact center platform. 

Listen to the full episode for more CCaaS myths and truths on the CX Punk podcast. and learn more about how UJET's born-in-the-cloud CCaaS technology can enable you to design seamless customer experiences on any device.