For today’s intelligent contact center, delivering a world-class customer experience is an imperative - with the flexibility to interact with customers on multiple channels, and the ability to be responsive as well as proactive. Meeting or exceeding your customers’ expectations requires integrating multiple channels and data sources to deliver a seamless experience — a challenge that can be made much easier by leveraging the power and flexibility of cloud hosting.
When it comes to fostering loyalty and growing customer value, ensure that you not only “talk the talk” but also “walk the walk.” Consider cloud deployment options to address challenges in delivering an omni-channel customer experience. Here are just a few of the ways “the cloud” can help:
A unified, omni-channel solution. Cobbling together customer support offerings from different vendors can be costly, time-consuming and result in a disjointed customer experience, especially when hardware integrations are involved. Customers don’t think in terms of “channels” — they think in terms of getting quick, convenient answers to their questions. The intelligent contact center of the future delivers an omni-channel solution that empowers customers to easily transition from voice, mobile or text self-service to agent-assisted service. To make the experience just as seamless on the back end, a powerful agent desktop and computer telephony integration (CTI) delivers essential context to calls, and integrated reporting and recording capabilities help management ensure everything is working smoothly. A cloud-based, all-in-one solution delivers the capabilities you need to serve customers today — and a cloud hosting provider with resources and vision will guarantee your platform continues to evolve and offer leading-edge features that customers will appreciate in the future.
CRM integration. The ability to integrate with Salesforce or another CRM easily gives agents real-time access to pertinent customer data, making it easy to deliver a personalized customer experience. Whether you’re building an outbound platform for contacting customer accounts and sales prospects or an inbound platform for managing orders and cases, a cloud hosting platform that supports CRM integration and APIs can easily leverage your existing systems to keep your agents more productive and informed.
Scalability and flexibility. The intelligent contact center should be as fluid as your business - capable of handling seasonal spikes in contacts, flexible to allow your agents to interact with customers over channels like multi-session chat in addition to voice, and able to seamlessly scale as your business grows. On-demand scalability is one of the key advantages of a cloud contact center solution. Look for a vendor whose network model supports capacity well in excess of peak call volume, with a common-sense pricing model that ensures you only pay for the resources you use. The right provider can get your system up and running in a matter of days - not weeks or months - with intuitive agent and supervisor desktops that reduce ramp-up time. Also look for platforms with robust documentation and responsive support teams, so you can hit the ground running. And once you’ve deployed your cloud contact center, providers with pay-as-you-go models provide you the ability to scale up and down as business needs dictate, ensuring you only pay for the resources you use.
Though “the cloud” is a new form of deployment, it’s possible to migrate to the cloud and retain deep expertise in the tried-and-true contact center functionality your business needs — like CTI, predictive dialing, skills-based routing and performance analytics — while gaining the benefits of multiple, geographically dispersed data centers with the capacity to ensure your contact center continues to operate at 100%, even if one site becomes unavailable. Look for geographic, network and physical redundancy built into a vendor’s solution, documented processes for quickly getting your applications back up and running in the event of an outage and an aggressive service level agreement. 
Aspect makes it easy to deploy your contact center in the cloud with our flexible SaaS, hosting and managed services offerings. Learn about our new pure cloud offering, Zipwire, at zipwire.aspect.com.