Contact centers worldwide have gone under fundamental changes with the rise of multichannel communications across voice, email, web chat, SMS, and, with the advent of social media, like Facebook and Twitter. However, the complexity and costs of building a complete multichannel contact center infrastructure is hindering many organizations to fulfill their business needs while meeting customers’ expectations for a fast, personalized, and successful customer interactions.
Today, organizations have a broad opportunity to re-think how to build their contact center in order to optimize its function as a strategic asset that makes a vital contribution to achieving organizations goals. The emergence of cloud and web-based communications solutions is transforming how enterprises are building a smarter and more efficient contact center to differentiate their brand and deliver exceptional customer experiences now, and into the future.
Why the Cloud is the New Contact Center Infrastructure
Many enterprises who built a successful contact center infrastructure fully understand the complexity associated with systems deployment and integration, high capital expenditure costs, and resource requirements for on-going maintenance and upgrades. These factors have significantly contributed to a major shift of how organizations are changing their strategy to leverage the cloud as the new infrastructure for the contact center. The list of advantages offered by cloud-based contact center is compelling. Services can be accessed from anywhere, at any time. Cloud contact center deploy much faster than any on-premises solution—days or weeks versus months, and even years. Service enhancements are available far sooner than the typical hardware or software release, often at no or minimal cost. Cloud contact centers enable enterprises to match capacity with need and quickly scale, up or down, when needs change. The risk of over-investing (or under-investing) in infrastructure is completely removed.
Leveraging a cloud contact center also frees organizations to devote their limited capital resources to core growth areas rather than ancillary functions. Naturally, IT managers may be concerned about meeting availability expectations, but leading cloud providers offer very high reliability; often offering SLAs that meet or exceed 99.999%.
Turning the Contact Center into a Strategic Asset
Today’s contact center must respond to multiplying communications channels; changing and growing consumer expectations of quality, efficiency, and availability; and continued pressure to recruit and keep good agents—all while controlling costs. Many organizations struggle to keep up with the changing needs of their business and customers; forced to manage around the aging infrastructure of their current telephone-centric call center.
Integrating in-the-cloud contact center technologies yields a seamless contact center operation supporting each aspect of the contact center life cycle. An agent or supervisors can be located anywhere, access a complete contact center application suite using a web browser, and handle a comprehensive range of communications channels. Organizations can use in-home agents, agents at remote locations, and a centralized contact center—any or all—while offering high service levels, a unified agent platform and unprecedented business agility and control.
Transform the customer experience
A well-functioning contact center provides quality service that can build customer loyalty, enhance brand value, and grow revenue. For the contact center to make a vital contribution to organizational success, it must deliver outstanding customer experiences.
Communicating with customers in the ways they expect and prefer allows you to reach people when and how they’re most accessible. Customers may use voice, email, text, chat, and social media, and any particular interaction may use multiple channels. The contact center should automatically match customers with the optimal available resources. It should route any contact on the basis of relevant context, and agent expertise. The business benefits can be significant when using cloud-based intelligent contact routing. For example, one firm using performance-based routing increased their conversion rate from 29% to 52%.
Extending your investment in customer relationship management (CRM) systems, such as Salesforce.com, is another important element of delivering exceptional customer experience. Tight integration of CRM application with the contact center can help keep customers satisfied by personalizing the user experience. You can route customers to the optimal internal contact and give agents the information they need right at their fingertips. Cloud contact centers provide easier and more efficient methods for this tight CRM integration, often as out-of-the-box functionality.
Summary
Well-run contact centers have already taken many steps to optimize their customer service operation by leveraging cloud-based technologies. The unparalleled advantages of a cloud contact center are providing a clear path to better business agility, better customer experience, and better workforce productivity. For more information visit, http://www.liveops.com/cloud-contact-center/products 