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10 Reasons To Move To A Cloud Contact Centre Today

December 15, 2020

In our connected world, we all expect near-instantaneous access to information.

However your customers choose to contact you, they expect this same speed of service.

With legacy on-premise systems, the product lifecycle becomes ever shorter, which means agents can struggle to provide customers with quick answers because they have to fumble between different programs and screens to find information.

A frustrating experience for everyone involved.

With the sudden onslaught of COVID-19 lockdowns, 2020 proved that disaster recovery and business continuity is not just for major on-premise incidents. The immediate need for the flexibility of remote working left many organisations reeling in chaos as they attempted to put new systems in place at lightning speeds.

To keep pace in today’s hyperconnected world, your business must be able to connect agents with real-time knowledge sources about your products and customers wherever they work.

And, you need a contact centre infrastructure that’s flexible and agile enough to quickly respond to customer requests across all touchpoints, including voice, web, email, chat, mobile, and social channels.

Computer Keyboard

The Ability To Scale Quickly

Unlike legacy systems, a cloud solution allows you to instantly scale your team to meet the ebb and flow of customer demand.

Being able to add or reduce the number of agents as needed can be a business life-saver. During lockdowns, some businesses needed to rapidly increase operations, while others needed to temporarily downsize.

Say goodbye to needing additional hardware, or adding additional IT personnel to support your growth. Or having to pay for infrastructure you can’t use.

With the cloud, your company only pays for what it uses.

IT personOutstanding Reliability And High Availability

In years gone by, it may have been the case that premise-based contact centre systems offered greater reliability than hosted solutions.

But today’s enterprise-class cloud contact centre solutions provide you with the highest levels of availability, reliability, and disaster recovery available.

Infrastructure is housed in geographically redundant data centres and guarantee uptime as high as 99.99%.

These data centres are staffed with highly trained experts who manage the system 24/7 and perform all the latest upgrades.

Your data centres are always up-to-date.

cloud decisionProviding The Right Information At The Right Time

Customers often come to a call with frustrations stemming from previous poor service.

This makes your agent’s job difficult even before they say hello. Combine this with agents being forced to repeatedly switch between numerous legacy backend systems and contact channels, it can lead to frustration, human error, duplicated effort, and higher average hold and response times.

Cloud-based platforms help alleviate these problems by delivering context-sensitive call scripts via pop-ups based on integrations with caller ID, CRM databases, or other systems.

Scoring and analytics capabilities can also positively impact the customer experience by allowing administrators to quickly spot and address common problems.

Your agents instantly have everything they need to service a customer.

customer journey callReal-Time Contact Centre Support

Cloud-based contact centre solutions allow agents to follow the full thread of a customer’s journey from one channel to the next.

This allows agents to service customers more efficiently and better solve issues in real-time—or even anticipate their needs.

Your agents always have the full picture.

smiling woman with headsetMatching An Agent’s Skills To The Customer’s Needs

Customers now have the choice to communicate with your company in many ways—including web, mobile, chat, voice, IVR, email, and social channels.

This gives you access to huge pools of data that can reveal actionable insights.

But single-function contact centre servers and old-school PBX and IP PBX hardware make it difficult to parse the huge quantities of customer information that are available across your enterprise.

A cloud-based contact centre platform acts as a universal hub to gather and funnel customer data for analysis. Cloud contact centres can use behavioural, demographic, and location-based customer information to properly match the right agent to the right customer.

This approach can help to increase customer satisfaction while also delivering improvements in upsell and cross-sell rates.

Say hello to increased sales and happier customers.

successful callFaster Deployment Of New Capabilities

For companies using premise-based contact centre systems, it can take weeks—or even months or years—to deploy new sales tools and capabilities. The cost is also significant and by the time the capabilities are rolled out, newer ones are available. This means a premise-based system is always behind a cloud-based one.

With a cloud contact centre, you can add new sales tools and contact centre features on the fly, allowing agents to immediately act on new opportunities.

Plus, you can easily add or remove the features that work in your business without having to layout a small fortune.

You always have access to the latest technology.

successful callAssign Agents To Channels That Better Match Their Skills

Certain agents flourish with specific types of customer interactions.

With a cloud contact centre, your company can leverage the power of the universal queue to automatically route customers to an agent based on their skills.

This capability also can also boost productivity by helping identify agent downtime and then intelligently scheduling inbound or outbound calls based on availability. You decide when active channels (such as voice) should take precedence over passive channels (such as email).

Your contact centre can be more efficient.

successful callFielding The New “Connected Agent”

When critical customer, product, and other information is separated between different systems, agents can appear to be unknowledgeable or incompetent as they struggle to pull it all together.

This can lead to a disjointed experience for customers.

A cloud platform synthesizes all of this information into a single screen, creating a new breed of “connected agent” that can deliver the kind of competent support that resonates with customers.

Agents suddenly have access to vast storehouses of knowledge available in corporate systems, as well as third-party cloud services such as CRM and Support Desk systems. Screen pop-ups can further help keep agents one step ahead of customers by providing information about previous purchases, billing history, and other personal preferences.

Your organisation presents more professionally.

successful callSuperior Disaster Recovery And Business Continuity

Without costly investments in redundant hardware and software licenses, typical premise-based call centre systems simply do not provide the flexibility and scalability needed to adequately handle disaster recovery. This can potentially leave your company offline for hours, days, or even weeks. You could even experience longer downtimes as you scramble to install new hardware and software, or source new vendors.

By housing all contact centre infrastructure and critical data in a remote data centre—situated far from potential disruptions—a properly architected cloud contact centre provides superior business continuity.

And because the cloud works wherever there’s an internet connection, employees can use smartphones, laptops, tablets, or desktop computers to access the contact centre from virtually anywhere. In the event of a disaster, your agents can instantly failover to mobile devices or softphones on their home computers or at temporary work quarters.

No matter what happens your business can continue to flourish.

successful callStrong Security And Compliance

Few IT organizations can afford the resources or time to acquire the latest security measures that meet today’s increasingly strict privacy regulations. Maintaining strong physical security across many business locations—each with its own on-premise system—simply is not practical or cost-effective.

With a hosted cloud solution, companies have access to greater security measures to protect customer information than with traditional premise-based systems. An enterprise-class cloud contact centre provider typically will house all customer data in secure tier 1 data centres with strong physical and network security, managed by highly trained, on-site engineering specialists.

You provide better protection for your customers and your business.

successful callIn Summary

Contact centre managers and line-of-business leaders in charge of call centre functions recognize the critical importance of customer satisfaction and brand reputation. But today’s customers expect instant access to information, which can make them impatient with contact centre agents who cannot provide fast answers and rapid problem resolution.

The cloud allows businesses to dramatically improve the functionality of their contact centres.

Connecting agents to an integrated desktop with seamless access to various sources of knowledge improves first-call resolution and other key aspects of customer satisfaction.

The ability to quickly deploy the latest technologies further improves agent productivity. This results in less frustration on the part of both the agent and the customer. And compared to legacy on-premise systems, the cloud offers a cost-effective solution that scales easily, offers better reliability, and provides for quick disaster recovery.

All of which explains why small to large enterprises across the globe are rapidly abandoning on-premise hardware and moving their contact centre functionality to the cloud.

Moving to a cloud contact centre simply makes all-round sense.

If you’d like to discover how Cytrack software and services can help your business, we’ll be delighted to show you.

Get in touch with our friendly team using your preferred contact method below…