What Hardware and Software Is Required to Remote Manage a Cloud-Based Contact Centre?

Cloud-based contact centres are the future of successful customer experience.

In a world where your customers are becoming increasingly demanding, searching for the most intuitive and personalised experiences available, the cloud is the only environment where businesses have the freedom to adapt and pivot their strategies according to the needs of an ever-changing landscape.

Not only does the cloud deliver incredible scalability, but it also provides opportunity. With a cloud contact centre, you can tap into the money-saving opportunities of remote work for your employees or assess avenues for future growth using analytics and artificial intelligence. Of course, making your journey into the cloud means figuring out exactly what you need to transition.

Consider Your Current Environment

The steps that your business needs to take to move into the cloud will depend on a lot of things, including your existing environment. For instance, what kind of connectivity and bandwidth do you currently have in place? In Germany, 75.4% of workers say that they’re willing to work from home, but only 54.3% of their employers are able to provide the technology for this.

Knowing where you stand from a network perspective will help you to decide if you need to make any investments into your connectivity environment before you jump into buying a cloud contact centre. You might also need to think about the hardware that you have in place. For instance, should you be looking for a cloud solution that allows you to take advantage of your existing desk phones? Some cloud services integrate better with on-premise technology than others.

If you don’t already have any hardware in place, you might be able to consider a more full-cloud experience, where in-office and remote workers can use devices like desk phones and mobile equipment to make calls. This could save you a lot of initial investment, as headsets and cameras for video conferencing might be the only hardware required.

Think About Your Goals

Once you know your current environment, and what restrictions and limitations you need to overcome, you can consider what you want to accomplish with your cloud transformation. Every business wants a cloud contact centre with excellent voice quality and high uptimes, but what features do you need to achieve your specific goals?

For instance, do you want to create a more comprehensive communications environment that combines internal and external connections? If so, then you’ll need to look for a CCaaS (contact centre as a service) solution that combines with UCaaS (unified communications as a service).

With tools like RingCentral Office, you can create a full cloud environment, complete with collaboration tools like the RingCentral app for internal communication, and RingCentral Contact Centre for your conversations with customers. You might also want to integrate your cloud contact centre with the tools that your agents already rely on, like CRM solutions or ticketing applications.

It’s also worth considering where the future might take your business, and how extensible your contact centre needs to be. Choosing a vendor that can deliver opportunities for you to add new agents to your team at the click of a button or provision new technology when your business evolves is essential for a future-proof strategy.