Cloud contact centres are network-based services that enable you to handle customer interactions, provide customer service and take customer calls online through a web-accessible platform. CX CLOUD® is a cloud contact centre solution that helps businesses to maximise the value of their customer interactions. With CX CLOUD®, all interaction channels – including email, SMS, social media, chat, and chat bots – are seamlessly integrated into a single queuing and routing platform.
Why Cloud Contact Centres are the Best Option
Improved Customer Service
Cloud contact centres enable improved customer service through the integration of application programming interfaces (APIs). APIs gather customer data from multiple sources – for example an organisation’s CRM database – and feed it into the contact centre solution. The contact centre solution can then appropriately tailor the routing and delivery of an interaction, creating a personalised customer experience.
Safe and Secure
The in-built safeguards and redundancy of a cloud-based contact centre improve data security, recovery and safety for employees and customers. Not only is security embedded into your cloud-based contact centre, with the secure data centre fully geared up to block potential security threats, but business continuity is secured by housing both services and data in the cloud.
Environmentally Friendly
A cloud-based contact centre can dramatically decrease your environmental footprint as you no longer need the facilities or equipment associated with a traditional contact centre. Where employees are located off-premises (for example working from home), the carbon footprint of an office, which requires utilities like lighting, water, and heating, is completely eradicated. This can also help to significantly reduce administration overheads and costs, which can help to free up company resources.
Extended Hours
Through a cloud-based contact centre, you are able to have employees based in remote locations, potentially offering round the clock service via staff in different time zones. In turn, this increases business productivity and customer satisfaction. Moreover, this model provides flexibility for employees, allowing them to tailor their work schedule to suit their needs.
Reduced Downtime and Increased Reliability
With a cloud-based contact centre, there is no longer any need for ‘scheduled maintenance’. Rather, your trusted service partners are able to deal with software updates and maintenance on your behalf automatically and without interrupting regular customer service. This kind of flexibility is almost impossible to achieve in a premises-based contact centre.
Flexibility and Scalability
Fundamental benefits of cloud contact centres are easy flexibility and scalability. A cloud-based contact centre allows you to employ staff who are off-site and even based internationally. Not only does this allow extended contact hours, it also allows you to increase staff on the help desk during busy periods. This also enables you to increase response capability and decrease business downtime by having staff from other business areas (who are help desk-capable) temporarily assist by taking support calls.
This flexible and scalable model also allows you to adapt to fluctuations and changes in demand as it decreases the need for purchasing additional infrastructure (with a cost of time and dollars) and hiring IT resources for extended periods of time.
Ongoing Support
With CX CLOUD® you will no longer have to deal with the headache of dealing with technical issues, allowing you to focus on maximising the potential of your business. With automatic updates, high customisability, and no maintenance costs, you can reduce the IT overheads often associated with contact centres and instead focus on achieving high customer satisfaction.
Cost-Savings
Depending on the size of the contact centre and the number of IT staff supporting it, moving the contact centre to the cloud can be extremely cost-effective, particularly for smaller operations. Savings are not only realised in hardware, such as servers and PBX; there are also savings in IT person-hours, for example for upgrades and adds, moves and changes – since with a cloud contact centre these are bundled in with the license purchase.
Reduction of IT Burden
As noted above, the savings for IT can be significant for smaller contact centres in particular where the amount of maintenance is out of all proportion with the size of the operation. Supporting the contact centre can not only be labour-intensive – especially when it comes to monitoring, planning, obtaining approval for, scheduling and coordinating upgrades to software and hardware; it also requires a level of expertise and continuity that can be both difficult and costly to maintain. All of this overhead is instantly removed with the adoption of cloud contact centre.
Additional Features from CX CLOUD®
Multiple Channels and Intelligent Routing
CX CLOUD® enables cloud-based contact centres to filter communication through a number of communication channels. These channels – which include video, chat, SMS, social media and voice – share and communicate data and information to each other, allowing for seamless customer service. This also increases your business’s ability to collect data and improve customer service on a macro level.
Measure Performance with Detailed Reporting and Analytics
Through multi-channel integration and data collection, detailed reporting and analytics are able to measure performance. Real-time reporting is also available, providing a snapshot of agent activity and interaction delivery status. Data collection and analysis allows you to see your contact centre’s areas of strength as well as what needs to be improved and how. This can also help to improve the efficiency of your business by informing you on what you should be focusing on.
Conclusion
Evidently, there are many benefits to having a cloud-based contact centre, and these benefits are likely to increase as technology continues to proliferate, and resources and data improve. A cloud-based contact centre allows you to decrease expenditure on overheads associated with premises-based contact centres. This enables you to invest in other resources which will help to maximise your business and ensure that you are providing incredible customer service. The flexibility and on-going support provided by cloud-based technology means that cloud contact centres are the perfect way of adapting your help desk to the modern world.