Many contact centers are taking the leap from on-premise infrastructure to a cloud-based operations model. Soon, this transition will be less of an option to mull over and more of a ‘must do’ to remain competitive.
In this article, we’ll first look at the benefits of moving your contact center to the cloud. Next, we’ll examine the elements you need to consider before choosing your software. Finally, we’ll review the pros and cons of the different available platforms.
Why move to a cloud contact center?
There are numerous benefits to moving to a cloud platform - from massively improved functionality to reliability and accessibility. In summary, a cloud-based contact center will enable your employees to deliver the best possible customer experience, regardless of caller location or their preferred means of contact.
What are the benefits of cloud software?
- Centralized phone-based customer engagements on a digital platform, providing greatly enhanced customer experience. Whether they’re contacting you at night, in the daytime, by phone, email, or tweet, they need to have their question or issue dealt with quickly and efficiently.
- Calls scheduled and assigned based on a specific company’s configurations.
- Reduced need for landline networks and manual phone operations.
- Streamlined call center operations, improving efficiency, business outcomes, and customer satisfaction.
- Scale is quick and straightforward. As your contact center activity grows, so will the capacity of your cloud platform. Furthermore, it’s a simple matter to add a new communication channel.
- Reduced operational costs - often much lower than traditional solutions, dependent on expensive and inefficient hardware.
- Taking advantage of Artificial Intelligence – to support chatbots in basic data collection or handling simple inquiries to enable more effective modeling.
Cloud software for contact centers – what are the key elements?
Moving your contact center from physical premises to the cloud may be a simple decision to take, but deciding which software to go for is far from straightforward. These are the key elements you need to be looking at -
Integration with Business Tools
In order to efficiently solve customer issues, and manage data, your call center software should easily plug into business tools, such as your CRM, PBX, help desk, marketing platform, e-commerce platform, servers, and Microsoft Outlook.
Smart Interface
Your cloud-based call center needs an intuitive interface to support customer service agents in being resourceful when handling calls. For the best results, call recording, presence management, and collaboration should all be available on the same interface.
Flexibility and Scalability
To enable the growth of your business, you need to be able to add users, modules, or features to your phone system. Upgrading to more powerful schemes should be seamless.
Call Quality
Call quality is a vital element of the customer experience. Your call center’s VoIP phone system should have the best voice and video codecs in order to provide exceptional quality over minimum bandwidth.
Security and Encryption
Handling confidential information and sensitive data can make call centers vulnerable to security attacks. Good encryption support is important too.
The top 5 contact center cloud platforms
We’ve looked at the top 5 contact center cloud platforms and identified the principal features of each.
Five9
Intelligent algorithms ensure that the next caller is available when the next agent is ready.
Automated dialing process, skipping no-answers and busy signals, giving your employees more time to talk to live leads.
Easy to manage lists and campaigns, monitor calls, report in real-time, coach agents, and comply with TCPA.
Nice InContact CXone
A fully integrated cloud customer experience platform that is entirely scalable. The software allows agents to proactively interact with customers on any channel with its omnichannel routing. Coaching and managing team members is simple with CXone’s workforce optimization suite.
RingCentral
This adaptable cloud-based phone system supports both desktop and mobile users. It boasts a unique feature called ‘RingOut.’ This enables one-touch calling from any phone or internet-enabled computer. The software also has powerful call delegation and answering rules so you can be sure calls are routed to the right individual.
Genesys Cloud™
Customer relationships can be complex, but that doesn’t mean they have to be difficult. The Genesys Cloud™ software is built to handle any channel. It simplifies the way you connect with customers across channels, providing the context you need to deliver more personalized experiences and build stronger relationships.
Your employees will have the information they need in a tool they’ll love using. This all-in-one application will engage your employees and boost your team’s performance. You’ll enjoy the benefits of real-time dashboards and up-to-the-second analytics, plus all the insights you need to run your call center.
The software is quick to configure and intuitive to use. It continually innovates with upgrades each week.
Freshcaller
Freshcaller is a dedicated phone system that enables painless and easy international customer support calls. It’s a multi-level interactive voice response system that responds to calls via its app and features automatic call distribution.
Talkdesk
This end-to-end solution helps contact centers accelerate their business processes, boost performance, and enable a customer experience strategy. Talkdesk provides a comprehensive, out-of-the-box functionality that offers flexibility to choose your cloud deployment, customize your reporting and integrate to your existing tech stack.
Achieving a smooth transition to the cloud
You’ve chosen the right contact center software for your needs, but what happens when it’s time to make the big move to the cloud? Your challenge will be to achieve a transition that’s free from disruption. Whether you’re considering a full migration to the cloud or a hybrid arrangement, the answer lies in testing. For this to be effective, you need a testing plan, which is where Occam’s ETS Discovery tool comes in. The ETS Discovery tool delivers the following benefits -
- Spotting issues before they impact performance or customer service.
- Conducting real-time alerting (via email, SNMP, or SMS) of any potential issues or outages to ensure teams can resolve them before they impact the customer experience.
- Reducing average deployment times by 3 months, realizing cloud advantages and savings sooner.
- Providing the fastest route to deployment in the market whilst offering a significant ROI against other validation platforms.
Find out more for yourself about the benefits of the Occam ETS discovery tool. We are a Genesys Appfoundry partner as well as compatible with all major vendors. Book a demo call today.
