A cloud contact center is defined as a central internet-based communications hub that enables and stores data on inbound and outbound calls of an enterprise. This article presents a comprehensive view of a cloud contact center, its importance, benefits, and key features, as well as industry best practices to follow while migrating to the cloud.
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What Is a Cloud Contact Center (Cloud Telephony)?
A cloud contact center is a central internet-based communication hub that enables and stores data on inbound and outbound calls of an enterprise.
Cloud contact center, also known as cloud telephony, consists of a set of applications, and hosted services designed to support multi-channel communications, intelligent call routing management, missed call alerts, data analytics, and more. As modern customers now demand more personalized services on both traditional as well as digital channels, cloud contact center solutionsOpens a new window form the lynchpin to managing enterprise-customer interactions efficiently. Compared to on-premise PBX systems, cloud-based call centers offer simpler deployment, easier scalability, and zero infrastructure investments.
Benefits of Cloud Contact Center
By bringing together the myriad legacy and digital communications channels under one umbrella, cloud-based solutions enable agents to interact with customers through any medium—phone, email, chat, or social media—and record all communications for future reference.
Benefits of Cloud Contact Center
Cloud IVR software: A robust cloud solution is embedded with intelligent call-routing, assisted by auto-attendants and interactive voice responses (IVR), to ensure that the client calls are seamlessly forwarded to a qualified agent in the right department as quickly as possible. In addition, most operators often feature workforce management tools such as high-end dashboards, rich data insights, and advanced analytics to help supervisors effectively manage their agents’ performance, which boils down to higher productivity and quality customer service.
No hardware costs: Cloud contact centers don’t require hardware installation — the deployment and setup of a cloud-based contact center system in the business environment is quick and hassle-free. Besides, it enables agents to access all the advanced tools to deliver omnichannel communications, empowering them to provide highly personalized, 360-degree customer support regardless of geographical location or timezone. Migrating to a cloud contact center can go a long way in assisting organizations in any industry to scale up or down to meet their business requirements or priorities down the pipeline.
Integrations: Apart from laying a prompt emphasis on superior UX and UI by design, hosted solutions also focus on providing holistic, one-click integrations with the existing enterprise software systems such as CRM, call script generators, etc. This leads to an enriched agent experience, minimal data redundancy, and enhanced productivity, which can boost the C-suite’s capability to monitor all the organizational communication systems efficiently and make better, data-driven decisions.
Learn More: What Is Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC)? Definition, Design, Importance and Examples
10 Best Practices for Implementing and Managing Cloud Contact Center
In an age where the customer is king and driving positive customer experience is a prerequisite for success, more companies are looking forward to migrating their contact centers into the cloud. With a plethora of cloud contact center solutions offering advanced technological and organizational capabilities available in the market, we list down some of the industry best practices that companies must keep watch while adopting the cloud.
Following these best practices can fortify your brand name and ensure quality customer support in your contact centers, spawning improved performance and higher profits for the company.
1. Foster effective organizational collaboration
Establishing seamless communication and collaboration among agents, managers, supervisors, and IT personnel is vital to drive the quality of service in a cloud contact center. By leveraging collaboration tools such as instant messaging and presence information, agents can discreetly seek real-time advice from managers and subject matter experts quickly. For managers, this also offers the capability to perform silent monitoring or whisper coaching during live calls. A streamlined internal collaboration means improved KPIs for the organization and serves as a crucial differentiator in the race to success.
2. Efficient agent training
Although providing effective agent training is an obvious touchpoint in almost every call center, improving the training process and guidelines can do a lot in maximizing the potential of agents to perform at a higher level. Integrating regular coaching sessions and embracing advanced technology such as speech analytics is crucial to power up the overall performance of your contact center. In addition, enterprises can also leverage best practices followed by their top performers and utilize that vital intelligence as a reference to help underperforming agents scale up their output.
3. Provide a web interface
Integrating robust WebRTC APIs into the company’s web interface is critical to enhancing customer-agent communication, enabling both agents and customers to reach out to each other seamlessly and without pain. The cloud call centers of the modern era need to be structured around technology such as WebRTC for removing the legacy challenges and pain points that arise in customer service. Besides, it allows firms to directly plug in additional resources or remote workers without the need for any capital expenses or on-site hardware employment. As WebRTC communications can be accessed from the cloud, enterprises can also ensure that their workforce has access to the communication capabilities even during hardware or network outage from anywhere, which bolsters agent flexibility and augments the customer experiences.
4. Embed mobile customer care
In this mobile-first world where customers prefer to seek support from the comfort of their mobile phones, providing a quality mobile experience must be a top priority among cloud contact center best practices. Adopting a solution that incorporates omnichannel communications through chat, voice, and video within the mobile app itself can be a key pointer in driving customer satisfaction and retention, which in turn leads to increased profits for the organization. Adopting robust features into the architecture equips agents with the capability to seamlessly shift from chat to voice call to video when necessary, thereby beefing up the company’s reputation in the market.
5. Click-to-call connection
Click-to-call is yet another best practice that cloud telephony services should embrace to make customer service easy and painless. This feature enables users to directly connect with the support team by phone from the company website or app, via a button, image, text, or request a call back from the customer service agent. The click-to-call feature eliminates the burden of waiting on hold for customers and offers a more personalized service with the easy click of a button, which has proven to propel increased closing of sales and resolving support tickets quickly.
6. Adopting technology-powered solutions
As the world continues to race ahead on the digital curve, innovative technology such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) are rapidly proliferating into the cloud contact center vertical. Adopting these emerging tools can augment the capabilities of humans and allow them to glean actionable insights from the oceans of data captured today. Harnessing predictive analytics, AI engines empower call center managers to garner accurate performance reports of each customer service agent and offer additional training or grooming for driving productivity. Additionally, NLP-powered speech analytics algorithms help them analyze speech patterns and tonality of the customers’ voices, thereby assisting them to map out the future roadmap.
7. Adopt unified solutions across the organization
Deploying a unified solution across the various branches or business chains of your entire organization is a critical requirement to boost the rate of the first-call resolution in contact centers. It eliminates the agents’ pain in routing calls to the right sections, thereby removing the barriers to efficient communications. A reliable and powerful CRM software that integrates all the necessary data and purchase history of the customer can enable agents to deliver seamless communications across multiple channels, which naturally leads to enhanced efficiency in the contact center.
8. Drive automation wherever possible
Automating the redundant, most error-prone tasks such as data entry wherever possible can offer agents with a much-needed breathing space to attend to more important aspects of customer service. Adopting a solution that can auto-fill case data from the incoming email or self-service interaction, suggest contact matches, and automatically generate email follow-up responses can spur high data accuracy in the cloud contact center. Besides, this frees up agents to focus on things that truly matter—piloting effective customer engagement.
9. Focus on data security
The exponential growth in the number of data points created today has resulted in a newly found emphasis on the need for data security and privacy protection, with compliance mandates such as GDPR and Federal Privacy Regulations rising to prominence. Besides, the increasing number of cyberattacks on enterprise networks around the world calls for integrating powerful security integrations within contact centers to minimize any data breach. At this juncture, adopting cloud solutions that bake robust cybersecurity features into their architecture is crucial to ensure data protection and privacy. Alongside, efficient data backup and clear disaster recovery plans also play a significant role in triggering optimum performance in the call centers.
10. Continuous feedback and improvement
Embracing a work culture that breeds continuous improvement for employees through regular review meetings with teams, performance analyzes, brainstorming new training metrics, and more is another best practice that companies should focus on. By opening up the floor to agents and managers, organizations can address key challenges in the workflows of their contact centers and upswing their growth curve. Furthermore, firms who are in the pursuit to reduce customer churn and augment user satisfaction, in the long run, can capitalize on customer feedback from surveys, social media comments etc., to train their agents and managers better.
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