Let’s start this out with the answer to the question proposed in the title of this blog: Yes. A cloud contact center can help your business stand out. In fact, there are a myriad of ways the cloud can help including:
1. Enables your call center to always be available to support customers regardless of inclement weather, power outages, etc. Many clouds have been built to carrier class resiliency which means that it is purpose built to ensure that your callers aren’t impacted by a technology outage…even the loss of an entire data center. Moreover, there is an inherent ability of a cloud call center to handle re-routing on the fly — you can easily adjust routing to ensure agents are able to receive calls. If your headquarters experiences a power outage, you can reroute calls to a satellite office location or to your agent’s home through a multitude of means including landlines, wireless phones, or a softphone.
2. Makes it possible to hire the best agents regardless of geography or work-life balance needs. When your call center is hosted in the cloud, you are able to easily enable agents to work from anywhere with an Internet connection, which means you have opened your options up outside of your current geographical region(s). Because you can have agents working in the same queue from satellite offices or from their homes, you have a much larger pool of candidates to hire from. Now, you can be selective about finding the best possible agents for your call center.
3. Integrates with your business applications to provide a holistic view of the customer. With a cloud call center, you can integrate with your CRM or other applications. This provides your agents with richer insights into customer behaviors, and more effective customer interactions by empowering agents with more information.
4. Provides self-service capabilities. Through the application of modern phone technologies, you can offer callers the ability to get answers to their questions, even after hours. For instance, if you want to offer your customer the ability to check their account balance or perform routine transactions, the phone system can provide those capabilities and link directly with your internal systems to access the data and update your customer’s accounts.
5. Enables you to easily add seasonal staff or a third party for your busy time(s) of the year. Many call centers experience seasonal spikes and need to staff accordingly. A cloud-based call center model enables you to scale seats up and down as needed to match those seasonal requirements, so that you only pay for what you need, when you need it.
6. Real-time control by the call center staff. A cloud-based call center offers the ability for call center managers to handle many scheduling, routing and other capabilities on their own, rather than being at the mercy of their IT staff or their service provider. That way, they can address the everyday challenges of call volume or staffing by updating their call center’s routing or announcements in real-time.
For more information about cloud call centers, click here to download our Cloud Call Center Cloud Brief now.
Categories: Contact Center
About Rich Fox
At Evolve IP, I'm the Contact Center Director, which means I help organizations use cloud technology to provide enterprise class telephony, network, and security solutions. While my experiences vary from IT strategy to technology infrastructure and project management, I have a special talent for call center development. After so many diverse experiences, I can spot an organization that doesn't even know it's a contact center but needs to operate like one. For example, at PHH Mortgage I helped transform the sales division into a contact center. From concepts to workforce management to reporting, this approach helped our teams more effectively answer calls and increase revenue. We saved money just by getting the phone answered by the right person. When I'm not helping call centers optimize their performance, I'm either enjoying time with my family -- I have three kids -- or swimming laps, cycling, and running as I train for my next triathlon.
