Is it time to upgrade to cloud contact center?
Setting up a cloud contact center helps you deliver top-notch service and excellent customer experiences that will increase satisfaction and retention. Here’s everything you need to know on how to get started.
Customers are no longer only concerned with how good your product or service is. Their experience with your brand takes the front seat when deciding who they will stay loyal to. Part of their expectations for a high-quality experience is that they can contact a business anytime, anywhere, and on any platform they want.
That is why businesses are shifting their focus to deliver a personalized, frictionless, and intelligent customer and staff experience across every touchpoint with cloud contact centers.
In this blog, learn what is a cloud contact center, how it works, how it differs from on-premise contact centers, and how it can help you build unique customer experiences.
What is the difference between on-premise and cloud contact centers?
The engagement landscape is changing, and so are contact center dynamics – making on-premise call centers lose their relevance in modern business KPIs and metrics.
An on-premise call center provides communication hardware, operational infrastructure, and dedicated communication servers – all onsite.
A traditional call center may have the best agents working for them, but they can’t overcome obsolete on-premise hardware and software. And adding to the complexity is the cost of constant upgrades and maintenance.
What is a cloud based contact center?
A cloud contact center solution is a centralized hub for managing and serving client interactions across several channels.
One of its primary goals is to equip employees with the tools to provide efficient and streamlined customer support. And no matter how many employees are within an organization, the cloud makes it easy and cost-efficient to deliver the experience customers expect.
How does a cloud based contact center work?
A cloud contact center handles all customer communication over an internet connection. While contact center providers handle all technical setup, equipment, and maintenance.
It connects to other platforms and integrates all channels and your customer relationship management software (CRM) seamlessly. This integration allows your agents to access customer data and past interactions, use multiple channels, and more in one place, enabling them to deliver unmatched customer experience across all channels.
And since cloud contact centers work entirely over the internet, you only need to provide headsets, workstations, and internet connections for your team.
Here’s a quick side-by-side comparison to highlight what you need to know:
| On-premise call center | Cloud contact center | |
|---|---|---|
| Setup | Time consuming and costly, required planning, hardware and licensing setup | Easy, cost effective, quick deployment with no complexity |
| Equipment location | On-site | In the cloud or data center |
| Scalability | Additional costs for feature and hardware upgrades | No hardware costs, upgrades and new features included |
| Integrations | Limited integrations | Customizable and easy-to-integrate APIs |
| Flexibility | Agents cannot work remotely | Agents can work remotely |
| Communication channels | Inbound and outbound calls only | Omnichannel |
| Management and IT support | Primarily the business’s responsibility | Primarily the vendor’s responsibility |
But if you’re still operating with on-premise hardware that limits your agents (and customers) to a handful of channels while requiring expensive upgrades every few years – you’re not alone.
Although these benefits are no secret, many businesses struggle to part ways with their old infrastructure because moving to the cloud seems too big of a project. However, even though it might not be easy, switching to a cloud contact center can be manageable as long as you have an action plan broken down into bite-sized pieces.
What are the benefits of cloud contact centers?
A positive contact center customer experience is crucial to customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty.
70%
of customers want quick assistance on their preferred channel
50%
of customer churn on average is due to poor customer service
Here is the list of advantages of using a cloud contact center:
Bring scalability and flexibility to your customer support
A cloud-based contact center solution can help you improve agent efficiency and offer quality customer support in any situation with minimal on-premise infrastructure or software. Your agents can provide customer service from their desktop or mobile app. They can give real-time, cross-channel support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
By redirecting customers to contact your agents through digital channels, such as WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook Messenger, and Live Chat, a cloud contact center allows agents to handle multiple queries simultaneously – something they can’t do with phone calls alone.
Introducing these new channels will also improve your overall customer satisfaction, as you offer support over the apps your customers prefer to use.
Agents can also access customer context cards, which gives them access to relevant customer information – including purchase history, loyalty status, and general demographics, making it easier to provide personalized support – fast.
Use automation for faster resolution, employee productivity, and lower costs
Automation is a key part of the contact center digital transformation process since it improves employee productivity and reduces costs. However, it’s essential to position automation into the right parts of the contact center customer journey process.
So, identify the use cases for which AI chatbots, or an IVR system, make more sense than speaking to a live agent and vice-versa.
Thanks to automation, agents can focus on complex queries and leave the mundane tasks that clog up call centers, such as FAQs, to chatbots.
Automated customer service is a great way to reduce response times and allow your customers to self-serve their issues and get real-time answers. Integrated with a digital cloud contact center, your agents have access to complete chatbot conversation histories and can easily take over to handle the more complex issues – making it easier for agent takeover while improving first contact resolution and average handle time.
Unify data to improve customer experience
Connecting data from data silos and turning them into relevant insights for agents at the right moment is a challenge for any organization with a complex technology stack. Integrating a cloud contact center helps you improve that valuable data, which enables you to deliver personalized customer experience and improve agent productivity.
Cloud contact center technology helps you uncover what affects your customers’ behavior, brand perception, and customer advocacy—and enables your agent to address a customer goal through one interface rather than numerous tools and plugins.
Knowing this data helps prioritize your CX initiatives and equip agents with predictive and actionable insights.
To sum up, cloud based contact centers allow agents access to all customer communications in a single platform, customers can reach you on their preferred channel, in-depth call and agent performance analytics are available, calls are routed with less hold time, chatbots enable agent productivity, and more.
How to decide if a cloud contact center is the right solution for you?
To begin any journey, the first step is always preparation. By curating a list of everything you have and need, you can identify the gaps you need to fill.
To understand if a cloud contact center is right for your business, first ask yourself:
- What channels do you use to communicate with customers?
- How many queries, on average, can your contact center handle through these channels?
- What are your customers’ and agents’ most common pain points?
- Do you have tools that help you analyze and optimize contact center performance?
Once you know where you are and where you want to be, the next step is to gather all the right information – research, data, and insights – that tells you how to get there.
Now, ask yourself:
- What channels could you add to your contact center to be more accessible to customers?
- What insights or tools do your agents need to make their jobs easier?
- Which new technologies can help ease customer and agent pain points?
- Are there tools or solutions that can help you measure and reach your metrics and KPIs?
The answers to all the questions above will help you narrow your search and build out a detailed action plan to decide if a cloud contact center is the right solution for your business.
Why is a cloud contact center the best solution for your business?
To have this always-connected customer-centric strategy, your contact center must embrace technology to deliver an unmatched customer experience.
A cloud contact center enhances the customer journey and helps employees be more satisfied by creating valuable and lasting connections. It also connects multiple channels and devices agents use to work better and faster and deliver seamless interactions.
