An avalanche of acronyms
A recent conversation got me thinking about all the “as a service” acronyms I use in my daily life and don’t think twice about. Acronyms in technology tend to be a dime a dozen. It’s also easy to bob your head in the middle of the meeting as someone pronounces "CCaaS" or "UCaaS" as if we all went to decoder school. I thought it might be helpful to break it down the way I would over coffee.
Looking back: when phones were just phones
Back in the old days – maybe 30 years ago – organizations purchased lots of equipment, often called “boxes”, and phones that were separate from computers in order to largely handle voice calls. You had a phone on your desk, and it was ONLY for voice calls. You might have a separate cell phone or maybe you just had a personal phone. If you managed a call center, your center would depend on lots of boxes and lots of phones. These phones and boxes were connected by fiber or copper lines, and voice was kept separate from data. The world turned on capex cycles, maintenance contracts and business cases to fund equipment every 5-7 years if you really stretched things out.
The rise of SaaS
Enter “as a service.” You might have heard the term SaaS – software as a service. It’s basically renting software as opposed to buying it outright. Do you remember installing Microsoft Office from disk? SaaS is logging in and accessing what you need when you are connected to the Internet. No disks, no huge upfront cost. Just a subscription (or a few) and an internet connection to make it work. SaaS has been around for the desktop world for a long time, and in the past 20 years has spread to support almost everything you do, resulting in an unending appetite for bandwidth and Internet connectivity to make everything run. Instead of phones and boxes, you now buy licenses and bandwidth. And we all know what challenges arise if you struggle with bandwidth.
Now let's get a little more precise with our acronyms. UCaaS stands for Unified Communications as a Service. It’s the way that companies handle voice, messaging, video, and collaboration tools - all in a single location, and often through your computer instead of a desk phone. UCaaS is the technology that allows employees to communicate inside the company and with the outside world.
When we start talking about groups of people supporting customers, we need another application. Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) fuels volumes of interactions coming in to be handled by Sales, Service and Technical Support. It steers calls, manages chats, runs IVRs and monitors analytics, controlling all the tools your customer service people use to interact with buyers. Just as with SaaS and UCaaS, all of it is offered in the cloud.
That transition from owning technology to subscription has altered the way business is done, as well as the way businesses plan. CapEx becomes OpEx. You no longer have to wait three years to get the new capability because it gets pushed as part of your license. That’s huge in terms of agility and delivering efficient and effective ways for customers to interact. Instead of sizing boxes and phones, you now size cloud storage, bandwidth, and licenses. Then the next time you see "We're going to CCaaS," what they will likely be doing is updating the contact center, replacing the legacy equipment, and signing up for higher flexibility.
The payoff: flexibility, agility and the cloud advantage
It’s also huge in shifting budgets and how companies account for expenses associated with technology. Now, instead of large capital projects on multi-year cycles, there is more of a continuous improvement flow. The trade-off? Monthly or annual OpEx spend and required cloud connectivity to link everything together. It’s worth it to gain the efficiency, effectiveness and flexibility to drive toward every evolving customer experience.
And if you're wondering where the agentic AI fits into all this - it sits way at the top. It needs to have these cloud-native architectures into which to fit. Without these, you're attempting to teach an old dog very new tricks. If you need a refresher on agentic AI, my last newsletter should help.
Blue Orbit Consulting has been transforming contact centers for over 15 years. Interested in implementing new technology or AI tools into your customer service operation? Let’s talk.
