Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) is a cloud platform for incoming and outgoing customer contact across voice, email, chat and social media. The application runs in the cloud rather than on hardware you own. You pay a subscription, and capacity follows the size of your agent team.
What CCaaS includes
Most CCaaS products cover:
- Automatic call distribution (ACD) directs each enquiry to an agent using skill, availability and queue position
- Interactive voice response (IVR) allows the caller to complete a simple task or pick a destination before they reach a person
- Omnichannel routing puts voice, email, live chat, SMS and social messages into one agent workspace
- Wallboards and real-time reporting display how many people are waiting, how long they have been waiting, and how agents are performing
- Call recording and quality management to meet compliance duties and to coach staff
- Workforce management software for rotas and demand forecasts
- CRM integration that opens the customer record when the enquiry arrives
Who needs CCaaS?
CCaaS doesn't belong only to large enterprises. It's worth considering when a business:
- Has 5 or more people handling customer calls or enquiries
- Needs queue management, so a busy tone is not the fallback
- Wants visibility of volumes, waiting times and resolution rates
- Receives contact across more than one channel (phone, email, chat)
- Requires call recording for compliance or quality review
CCaaS vs Microsoft Teams Phone
Teams Phone is a telephone system for day-to-day business calls. CCaaS is a customer service platform. They're built for different jobs.
Staff who make and take ordinary internal and external calls are served well by Teams Phone. A dedicated team that works from queues, routing rules and detailed reporting needs CCaaS.
Plenty of organisations keep both. Teams Phone for general staff. CCaaS for the customer-facing team. Wanzo's business VoIP covers the general telephony side.
Popular CCaaS platforms
8x8 Contact Centre connects to Microsoft Teams and has established UK support. Five9 offers a broad set of capabilities aimed at mid-market teams. NICE CXone holds the lead among large enterprises and carries the widest range of functions. Amazon Connect bills by the minute with no upfront commitment, which suits volumes that rise and fall.
What it costs
The monthly fee depends on the vendor, the functions you switch on and the number of agents:
- Basic (voice only, simple routing): £30 to £60 per agent/month
- Standard (omnichannel, reporting): £60 to £120 per agent/month
- Premium (workforce management, AI features): £120 to £200 per agent/month
On-premise contact centre hardware typically costs £20,000 to £80,000 to buy, then an annual maintenance charge on top.
Automation alongside the contact centre
A large share of contact centre work is repetitive questions. An AI helpdesk can answer those and pass anything that needs a person into the CCaaS queue. The helpdesk does not replace the contact platform; it reduces the volume that agents have to pick up by hand.
How Wanzo helps
We put CCaaS in place for UK businesses. We map enquiry flows, recommend a platform, move you off the current system and look after the configuration once it is live. If the customer-facing team has grown past basic phone queues, we set out a contact platform that fits the workload without an enterprise budget.
What to do next
If you want CCaaS measured against your current setup, send us a message. We'll review volumes, channels and the systems you already run, then recommend a platform.