With the proliferation of technology in all aspects of our lives, businesses are being forced to change and adapt. Increasingly, businesses are moving from a reliance on traditional forms of infrastructure to new technologies and platforms to stay relevant in an ever-changing market.
One significant way this is happening is through the introduction of cloud-based contact centres. These centres are replacing traditional premises-based contact centres, moving equipment and operations offsite, and typically moving capital expenditure to operational expenditure. Cloud contact centres can offer your company multiple benefits while ensuring that your services stand out in an already-competitive sphere.
A Definition: What is a Cloud Contact Centre?
From a technology point of view, a cloud-based contact centre is a network-based service that essentially replaces a premises-based contact centre with a web-based platform. Through this platform, organisations take customer calls and handle general customer interactions. These centres provide agent seats remotely to businesses, via a subscription pricing model.
Unlike premises-based contact centres, cloud contact centres are not fixed at a single location and are therefore not restricted by things like telephone lines in a building or the number of agents available in that location. Rather, organisations using cloud-based contact centres are able to recruit remote agents, which reduces overheads and increases the efficiency of your contact centre.
What is an Example of Cloud Contact Centre Technology?
The CX CLOUD® contact centre solution helps streamline and maximise the potential of your contact centre. CX CLOUD® provides queuing and routing of all interactions, from voice and SMS to email, social media and chat. Through offering rich omni-channel features in an intuitive agent interface, CX CLOUD® allows organisations to deliver quick, efficient and successful customer service with minimal effort.
Key Features of a Cloud Contact Centre
Flexibility
Cloud-based contact centres offer the unique advantage of enabling organisations to connect agents remotely from anywhere around the world to their contact centre instance, in order to handle interactions. This enables contact hours to be extended, providing customers with around-the-clock access. This model also enables your business to boost response capability and minimise business downtime during busy contact centre hours by temporarily seconding staff from other sectors of your business to assist with support calls.
The result of this flexible working environment is an increase in employee satisfaction and retention as it allows them to work flexible hours from their preferred location to suit their personal schedules and lifestyles.
This flexibility also enables business continuity. Authorised contact centre managers are able to add new agents or adjust call-routing rules instantly. This ensures that, even in unforeseen circumstances, you are able to maintain full service.
Easy Implementation
Cloud-based contact centres are easily implemented and integrated into already-established businesses. In particular, the CX CLOUD® solution can be overlaid on existing infrastructure to enable an efficient and seamless transition to a cloud contact centre. The upkeep of a cloud-based contact centre is also simplified through automatic software updates, which can be implemented with a single click.
A cloud-based contact centre also requires far less physical infrastructure and equipment. Not only does this reduce your overheads and streamline the functionality of your contact centre, it can also minimise your environmental impact compared to the carbon footprint produced by a premises-based contact centre.
Security
By accumulating your contact centre under one database, you can increase the security of your cloud-based contact centre. By housing your information in a secure data centre, CX CLOUD® allows you peace of mind to continue to work safely with your own and your customers’ confidential information.
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.
Conclusion
By adopting a cloud-based contact centre, you can access myriad benefits, maximise your business and reduce unnecessary costs, freeing up your budget to invest in other important aspects of your company.
In this ever-changing technological landscape, it’s beneficial to stay ahead of the curve not only to survive, but to thrive. With a cloud-based contact centre, you can ensure that you’re staying on top of digital trends and adapting to the modern business landscape.