Increasingly, many modern-day contact centers are now cloud-based contact centers. With many of their core technologies now in the cloud, such contact centers have plenty of advantages over non-cloud contact centers.
A cloud-based call center is an advanced alternative to legacy on-premises contact centers. It has its critical tools in the cloud and is hosted and supported by a third-party cloud service provider (CSP). It also uses the latest in communications and routing technologies that can deliver amazing customer experiences that legacy contact centers just cannot.
Here are 5 reasons contact centers should consider moving to the cloud.
1. Easy to Scale the Workforce
Almost every contact center experiences ebb and flows in customer demand, say, during the holiday season or immediately after a crisis. To keep up with such developments, legacy contact centers need to increase their workforce size and support them with additional software licenses, voice modules, expansion I/O cards, and other hardware/software add-ons. These additions are not only time-consuming, but also expensive, and often wasteful.
With a cloud-based contact center, it’s easy to scale the workforce to meet changing customer demands quickly and at a minimal cost. Not only can the organization add or reduce the number of agents as needed; it can also support extra tools and platforms that are easy to access and used on an affordable, “pay as you go” basis.
2. More Reliable Service
The best cloud solutions house their infrastructure in geographically redundant data centers. This ensures that the contact center can provide reliable support to its customers, the highest possible availability, and guaranteed uptime of as high as 99.99%. Geo-redundant data centers also provide failover insurance when the primary server is down to further ensure day-to-day continuity, plus improved response times for users, lower latency, and better Quality of Service.
Cloud-based data centers also ensure robust disaster recovery in case of unplanned incidents, such as power outages or natural disasters, thus minimizing the negative impact to the IT infrastructure, or worse, on customer experiences.
3. More Productive Agents
With a cloud-based service, agents no longer have to depend on on-premises tools or platforms. They also don’t have to toggle between multiple applications or deal with clunky, legacy hardware that complicates workflows, increases frustration, and often affects their performance and productivity.
Instead, they can leverage cloud-based tools and technologies like unified agent desktops, skills-based routing, and predictive dialers to simplify their workflows. This allows them to move away from unproductive navigation tasks, and focus on improving customer interactions, reducing turnaround and wait times, and providing the best possible service.
Supervisors and managers also have access to powerful cloud tools such as supervisor desktops, workforce management (WFM), quality management (QM), and performance management (PM), plus reports and dashboards. These tools allow them to review real-time performance data, identify gaps, take steps to optimize agent and contact center output and quality.
4. Location- and Time-agnostic Service
Since cloud technology is location-agnostic, agents can access cloud-based customer support tools from anywhere, as long as they have a reliable Internet connection. This provides the contact center the flexibility to assemble a team of remote agents, and provide uninterrupted customer support from anywhere. This is an especially important benefit in the post-COVID world where social distancing has become the norm, and companies in every industry – including customer service – have had to adjust to remote work to ensure business continuity.
Moreover, in places, where it might be difficult to recruit good at-location agents, the ability to hire remote agents also provides a huge advantage. Furthermore, just like an on-premises contact center, the cloud contact center can easily set up teams to work in different shifts to serve customers in different countries or time zones.
5. Easy to Add Channels and Integrate with other Platforms
Cloud contact centers support multi-channel operations, meaning that it’s easy to add new support channels based on the popularity of communication touchpoints. For instance, if more customers prefer live chat or chatbots over voice or email, the contact center can easily add these channels with a cloud-based solution.
Moreover, most cloud-based systems integrate easily with other business applications like ERP or CRM platforms, or ticketing systems. Integration modules and APIs ensure smooth integration and allow the contact center to leverage powerful synergies to create holistic customer support solutions with minimal technical effort or cost.
Conclusion
Legacy, on-premises contact centers had their day in the sun. But as contact centers now realize the limitations of such systems, they are open to embracing a new way to run their business. This new way is cost-effective, transparent, easy to set up and manage, and scalable. A cloud-based contact center easily ticks all these boxes.
Offering unmatched service reliability and availability, optimum agent productivity, and enhanced customer experiences – a cloud-based platform like Syrow is the right choice for modern contact centers looking to gain a competitive advantage.
Key Takeaways:
- A cloud-based call center uses the latest in communications and routing technologies that can deliver amazing customer experiences.
- The cloud-based systems integrate easily with other business applications like ERP or CRM platforms, or ticketing systems.
- Cloud-based data centers ensure robust disaster recovery in case of unplanned incidents like power outages or natural disasters.
- Powerful cloud tools like supervisor desktops, workforce management (WFM), quality management (QM), performance management (PM), reports, and dashboards allow the managers to review real-time performance data.
- A cloud contact center has the flexibility to assemble a team of remote agents providing uninterrupted customer support from anywhere to work in different countries, shifts, or time zones.