If your contact center is considering a move to the cloud this year, you’re far from alone. Research from ICMI finds that approximately 30 percent of contact centers are planning to make the same move, joining the 30 percent of contact centers who have already moved to the cloud (at least in part), attracted to cloud-based contact center solutions by reduced costs and capital investment, speed to deployment, easier integration, broader and more affordable feature sets, remote use and administration and lower IT costs.

But there’s more to a cloud-based solution than cost and speed to deployment. According to a recent infographic produced by Aspect’s (News - Alert) Zipwire, based on data from ICMI, there are numerous subtler (but no less important) benefits to cloud-based solutions, including an improved agent experience. Specifically:

38 percent of agents said they would be happier and 30 percent would feel more confident with a simplified agent desktop. Since it’s a fact that employee engagement in the contact center leads directly to better customer service and customer engagement, this is a critical point.  A cloud-based solution can offer this simplified and easier to navigate agent desktop.

69 percent of those interviewed say agent productivity and efficiency is decreased by all the disparate systems and applications. Many contact centers today are still struggling with home-grown legacy solutions, out-of-date premise-based solutions and poor integrations between them all, which makes more work for agents trying to navigate difficult paths just to perform simple tasks. This leads to burned out agents, errors, duplicated effort and delays in servicing customers properly.

43 percent of contact centers don’t have enough budget to consolidate the desktop and 30 percent don’t have the resources, according to the graphic. A cloud-based solution can make this a cost-effective and affordable move to make to begin giving agents a better work experience and customers a better customer experience.

Customer satisfaction rates would rise if customers are offered a channel of choice. Today’s cloud-based contact center solutions have another great benefit: they allow companies to offer a broader array of channels (which customers like) and service all those channels in a single, unified queue.

Companies can treat channels they may not have even offered before – Web chat, social media, mobile app – just like phone calls, applying skills-based routing and even pulling those channels into workforce management and performance management.

Other benefits that are more administrative include eliminating integration problems – a traditional nightmare for contact centers using multiple solutions and platforms – better agility and remote work possibilities as well as remote administration.

As the infographic says, “Don’t let the power of the cloud pass you by.” Your customers expect better today, and it’s critical that your business be well positioned to provide them with what they want.