Cloud Is the New Black in Contact Centre

In an age where customer experience is king, your contact centre must be as efficient, intuitive, and productive as possible.

Studies suggest that 89% of businesses will need to compete solely on customer experience (CX) in the future. As the solution bridging the gap between your company and your consumer community, your contact centre must be fit for purpose in the world of CX.

Unfortunately, traditional contact centres aren’t always as effective as they should be. Consumers frequently complain about slow turnaround times, hold durations and the issue of having to explain their problem to multiple agents. Fortunately, the advent of the new cloud contact centre could be the way to overcome many of these issues.

Cloud contact centres are quickly becoming the de facto option for organisations dedicated to reducing operational costs and improving customer service. Here are some of the reasons why the cloud is leading the way to a brighter future for contact centres.

1.    Custom-made contact centres

One of the most significant benefits of the cloud is its inherent flexibility. The cloud is designed for experimentation, which means that modern companies can build the solution that adheres to their needs at any given time. In an “agile” environment where new technologies and trends arrive every day, companies can experiment with multichannel services, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, and various other disruptive solutions.

The cloud means you can alter different services as you learn more about your customers and your needs.

Whereas implementing the latest tools into your on-premises contact centre would require significant investment and time, the cloud means that you can just add, remove, or alter different services as you continue to learn more about the preferences of your customers and the needs of your agents.

2.    Scalability

The contact centre is a dynamic space in any business environment. Thanks to things like service changes, product launches, and seasonality, most contact centres will require different levels of support during specific periods of the year. Unfortunately, with an on-premises contact centre, achieving that level of required scalability is a challenge. Temporary upgrades to your infrastructure are practically impossible, which means any fluctuation in service more expensive.

Whether you need to expand to accommodate new demand or scale back to keep costs low during quiet times, the cloud can help Click To Tweet

Alternatively, in the cloud, you can access or remove resources at a moment’s notice. The cloud provides you with instant access to all the services and licenses you need within a moment’s notice. That means that whether you need to expand to accommodate new demand or scale back to keep costs low during quiet times, the cloud can help.

3.    Open platforms and APIs

As mentioned above, the nature of the cloud means that you can implement new tools into your existing systems to help the entire business run smoothly. For instance, if you decide to add a self-service option into your contact centre to serve the 85% of interactions predicted to take place without human interaction, you won’t need to change your entire infrastructure.

The open and versatile standards of cloud contact centres ensure that you can build on top of the foundation you’ve already begun to create, establishing a pathway to the future, without giving up on the investments you made in the past.

The fact that cloud contact centres are primed for integration also means that you can connect your communication system with contextual solutions to help agents provide more personalised services for customers. Many cloud contact centres, including the RingCentral solution, automatically integrate with ERM, CRM, and other databases.

4.    Business continuity

In a standard contact centre, if disaster strikes, companies are left waiting hours, or even days, before they can launch their business again. If problems happen in your contact centre that damage data or make it unavailable in one space, backups on the cloud ensure that you can continue to work as usual with practically no disruption to service.

If the worst happens, your contact centre agents will still be able to access your contact centre platform using the device that’s suitable for them. The cloud contact centre not only allows for remote working to facilitate the changing workforce of the modern era, but it also means that you can continue to run your business environment from anywhere when disaster strikes.

Some companies even provide cloud contact centre systems to different workers around the world to make sure that they can give their customers 24/7 support every day of the year without interruption.

5.    Security and availability

Speaking of keeping your business up and running no matter what, cloud solutions offer the incredible benefit of keeping your information safe. Hybrid cloud solutions provide brands with the flexibility they need to secure sensitive data in a private cloud environment or storing less sensitive data in public clouds. Cloud contact centres also come with stronger disaster recovery functions than an on-premises service, because your data will always be available, no matter where disaster strikes.

When something goes wrong in a cloud environment, your processes can be directly shifted to the next available solution through instant failover. Click To Tweet

The cloud also provides world-class availability and redundancy. RingCentral’s cloud contact centre puts redundancy features in place to ensure that if any issues happen within one data centre, you can continue to access customer information and take calls with practically no disruption to services. When something goes wrong in a cloud environment, your processes can be directly shifted to the next available solution through instant failover. Other features include:

• Latency-based routing
• Elastic load balancing
• Failure recovery

6.    Continuous upgrades and new features

Today’s customers expect the businesses they work with to be on the cutting edge of technology. Clients are looking for fully immersive, intelligent, and omnichannel interactions with brands. Unfortunately, staying ahead of the curve with an on-premises contact centre isn’t easy. The cloud takes the expense and stress away from managing a forward-thinking and future-proof customer contact environment.

With the cloud, the latest upgrades and technologies are always available. Whether you’re experimenting with omnichannel customer support services or artificial intelligence for contextual support, implementing new strategies is easy.

With a cloud contact centre, you not only offer the best service available to your customers today, but you also give them the solutions they need for tomorrow too.

Learn more about how contact centre technology can create a better experience for customers and agentsLearn more