Take a sustainable approach to CCaaS implementation, by working with SaaSCom to choose an eco-conscious vendor, and offset your carbon emissions.
The contact center and CX (customer experience) landscape is moving through a period of rapid transformation. Today’s customers prioritize excellent experiences above anything else. In fact, regardless of the quality of your products, or even your competitive pricing strategy, 52% of customers will switch to a competitor after just one bad experience.
To survive in this landscape, companies need to invest in new technologies that empower them to meet their customers on every channel, and deliver faster, more convenient, and more personalized experiences. Unfortunately, the digital transformation of the contact center comes with its own set of unique challenges to consider.
One of the most significant hurdles companies face today, is figuring out how to optimize their contact center technology, while adhering to evolving ESG standards, regulatory guidelines, and sustainability requirements.
While the rise of CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) platforms gives companies an opportunity to minimize some of their carbon footprints, with a transition into the cloud, achieving ever-evolving sustainability goals requires a more comprehensive strategy.
Here’s how you can design and implement a more sustainable contact center, in 2024.
Why Design a Sustainable Contact Center?
In the past, when most companies thought about optimizing the contact center, their focus wouldn’t automatically be on making their ecosystem more “sustainable” or eco-friendly. For the majority of business leaders, digital transformation efforts were implemented to reduce costs, improve operational efficiencies, and streamline customer service processes.
While those goals are still relevant today, there’s also a growing need for businesses in all industries to demonstrate a commitment to protecting the environment. Already, investors in every industry are paying closer attention to the ESG initiatives of companies they support, and 32% of customers say they’d pay more to buy products from a sustainable vendor.
As the world becomes more aware of the impact businesses have on the environment, organizations are facing more pressure to implement more holistic ESG initiatives. Customers, stakeholders, and investors want to see clear evidence companies are taking steps to offset their carbon emissions, whether that means planting trees, reducing waste, or purchasing eco-friendly technology.
This means businesses need to rethink how they plan digital transformation initiatives, and increase their focus on eco-friendly strategies. In fact, by 2027, Gartner predicts that up to 25% of a CIO’s compensation will be based on how well they implement sustainability initiatives.
The good news for companies investing in new contact center solutions, is that the era of cloud adoption is already paving the way for the development of more sustainable contact centers. The shift to the cloud can empower companies to reduce the carbon emissions caused by large brick-and-mortar contact centers and daily commutes, by allowing staff to work remotely.
It can even reduce the amount of technical infrastructure companies need to manage in-house, minimizing their electricity and power consumption. However, there are additional steps companies will need to consider if they want to make their CCaaS initiative truly sustainable.
How to Create a Sustainable Contact Center
Perhaps the simplest and most significant way to design a sustainable contact center, is to embrace the CCaaS trend. Studies show that in the UK alone, call center professionals generate around 1.3 million tons of CO2 emissions with their daily commutes. That excludes all of the additional emissions created by heating, powering, and cooling large buildings.
Shifting your contact center into the cloud offers an excellent opportunity to embrace the efficiency, productivity, and sustainability-boosting benefits of hybrid and remote work. But there are additional steps to consider too.
Step 1: Choosing the Right CCaaS Solution
The growing demand for hybrid work, and scalable contact center solutions has led to skyrocketing adoption of CCaaS solutions already. By 2032, experts believe the market for CCaaS will be worth an incredible $23.94 billion. However, not every cloud contact center provider offers the same features, packages, and solutions for sustainability-focused companies.
Simply transitioning into the cloud on its own won’t eliminate your carbon footprint. Data centers and cloud resources still require energy to operate. Working with a cloud provider can reduce the energy you use in-house, and help you improve power utilization. But you need to ensure you’re choosing a contact center vendor that’s investing in reducing carbon emissions.
For instance, 8×8, one of the leaders in the CCaaS landscape, has actively reduced its carbon emissions by a third in the last 3 years, and sources a significant amount of the energy used to power its data centers from renewable sources. Cisco is another company that’s proactively investing in making it’s data centers carbon-neutral, and the company even allows companies to save money on hardware when they trade in and recycle old devices.
Learning as much as you can about the CCaaS vendors you’re considering working with, the data resources they use, and their approach to sustainability will help you to make a more informed decision when choosing your vendor.
Step 2: Leveraging Additional CCaaS Services
As mentioned above, some CCaaS providers are more effective at helping companies reach their sustainability goals than others. Searching for a vendor that has it’s own distinct ESG initiatives in place, and a plan to reduce carbon emissions is a good first step. However, it’s also worth looking at the other services that your vendor can provide, to boost your chances of success, such as:
- Automation technologies: Automation tools implemented into your contact center environment can play an important role in optimizing the use of resources. They can help you build workflows that minimize unnecessary bandwidth and energy consumption, streamline resource provisioning, and track power usage.
- Online portals: Online portals give companies an opportunity to reduce carbon emissions by providing access to zero-touch provisioning and management tools. They also reduce waste in the contact center, by converting paper bills and documents into digital files.
- Efficient data storage solutions: Contact centers need to store vast volumes of data for compliance, training, and analytical purposes.Leading cloud contact center (CCaaS) providers can offer companies access to efficient storage solutions, with embedded features for data deduplication and compression, optimizing resource usage.
Some companies, like Cisco, even allow organizations to hire the hardware they need for their contact center, which reduces upfront costs, and minimizes the amount of electronic waste produced by your customer service team.
Step 3: Consolidating Your Cloud Architecture
While migrating your business processes into the cloud won’t eliminate carbon emissions on its own, it’s an excellent way to significantly reduce your footprint. For the standard organization, shifting an on-premises contact center into the cloud can reduce carbon emissions by 84% and cut energy consumption by another 65%.
However, the best results come from a holistic approach. Moving just a portion of your processes into the cloud mean you can leverage cutting-edge and scalable tools, but you may still be unable to embrace hybrid and remote working processes that can reduce your carbon emissions.
For instance, your contact center agents might be able communicate with customers from the cloud, but need to visit the office to collaborate with other team members. Expanding your cloud footprint, by bringing multiple solutions and tools together in the cloud can help you achieve a variety of goals.
First, it can reduce your carbon footprint, by enabling productive hybrid and remote working strategies, and minimizing the number of disparate data centers and platforms you need to leverage. Secondly, it can help boost productivity and employee efficiency levels, and even improve customer experience. When employees can access all the tools they need to excel in the same environment, they can solve customer issues faster, and more effectively.
Step 4: Reducing the Need for In-Person Service
The way consumers access support and service from the companies they work with has changed drastically in recent years. The rise of the “omnichannel” contact center means consumers can interact with agents through countless channels, from social media, to SMS, and video chat.
However, there are still companies that rely heavily on delivering in-person technical support to their customers, particularly in the B2B world. Investing in the right CCaaS solutions can minimize the need for in-person support. This reduces the need for technical experts to travel to customer locations to offer in-person guidance and assistance.
To reduce the need for in-person support, you can explore opportunities like video conferencing in the contact center, leveraging tools that allow agents and customers to share screens, resources, and visuals in real-time. You can create onboarding guides and virtual assistants that help customers troubleshoot and fix issues on their own, without the need for agent input.
This not only reduces your carbon emissions, but it also minimizes the pressure on your customer service teams, helping you to make the most of your available resources. You could even consider adding cutting-edge technology to your CCaaS roadmap.
For instance, extended reality tools (virtual, augmented, and mixed reality), can allow agents and experts to deliver remote support to customers wherever they are, with real-time annotation, video streaming, and more.
Step 5: Leveraging the Right Contact Center Analytics
Finally, most contact center and business leaders know that they need to evaluate large volumes of data to improve the efficiency and performance of their customer service team. However, if your focus is on building a sustainable contact center, you should be tracking more than just CX metrics.
Innovators in the technology landscape can give companies access to valuable tools and sensors, which leverage AI, and IoT technology to track resource utilization and energy consumption. This can give you a behind-the-scenes insight into just how efficient your customer service practices are, and help you to identify opportunities to reduce emissions.
There are even some vendors out there who offer access to AI-powered solutions that can automatically adjust resource allocation in your contact center, to ensure you’re adhering to your energy usage thresholds and sustainability goals.
The Easy Option: Build Sustainable Contact Center with SaaSCom
CCaaS solutions offer today’s companies an excellent opportunity to reduce operational costs, adapt to changing customer preferences, and design more sustainable workflows. However, implementing the right sustainable contact center strategy can be complex without the right support.
Perhaps the easiest way to ensure your CCaaS initiative aligns with your goals for eco-conscious business management, is to work with the right partner. At SaaSCom, we don’t just help companies to choose the right CCaaS vendor based on their approach to sustainability and feature offerings.
We also actively invest in helping you to offset your carbon emissions. When we work with companies on their contact center digital transformation initiatives, we help them access funding that allows them to plant trees in regions around the world, offsetting their carbon footprint.
For instance, when we worked with a leading battery company, responsible for over 300 wholesale warehouses, and more than 200,000 dealers, we helped guide them towards a CCaaS solution that addressed their customer service goals, and unified their technology stack.
Not only did we help this company to access the technology they needed to boost productivity and efficiency, but we helped them access £250,000 in digital transformation funding, which they used to plant trees capable of offsetting 830 tonnes of CO2 each year!
Create a Sustainable Contact Center Strategy
Simply transitioning from a legacy on-premises contact center solution into a cloud-based ecosystem can be an excellent way to reduce your carbon footprint, and improve business performance. However, if you really want to stand out for your focus on sustainability and eco-friendly operations, you need a holistic approach to building a sustainable contact center.
Working with a partner like SaaSCom to choose the right vendor, consolidate your cloud architecture, and leverage the tools you need to digitally transform customer service can help you reach your sustainability goals. What’s more, our partnership with sustainability initiatives means we can help you implement comprehensive carbon offsetting programs, as you embrace the CCaaS revolution.
Contact SaaSCom today to see how we can help you design a sustainable contact center strategy that helps you reach your CX and digital transformation goals, while reducing your carbon footprint.
