Cloud communications are, quite simply, changing the way the world interacts. As penetration of cloud technologies broadens, we are seeing evidence of this across a number of enterprises in a variety of industries. A recent report from IDC has found that the shift of enterprise software to the cloud has accelerated over the past few years. By providing low setup costs, pay-per-use or subscription pricing, on-demand scalability, frequent upgrades, and easy access, software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)) has enabled businesses to become agile, flexible, scalable and efficient.

Cloud communications have a lot to offer not only enterprises, but their customers. Contact centers are increasingly cloud-based today, and this has meant an unprecedented amount of agility for these businesses. They can tie disparate contact centers together into one large customer support entity, sharing resources across geographical borders. They can bring experts – regardless of where they are located – into the contact center as resources. They can use home-based agents in order to keep costs down and boost the quality of service. They can achieve true multichannel integration, so customers are offered an all-encompassing, 360-degree customer experience regardless of which channel they choose.

Call center on demand solutions providers such as Five9 allow companies to be up and running with a robust, flexible and scalable call center quickly. Customers can engage with contact centers via a variety or combination of many channels: phone, web, chat, email, mobile apps, or social media. Companies can support customers’ inbound inquiries but also engage in proactive outbound campaigns, as well. (The hardware necessary for outbound campaigns prior to the era of the cloud was too cost-prohibitive for a company that wished to do outbound work on a part-time basis.)

The cloud also makes quality easier to achieve. Contact centers can engage in 100 percent call recording (possible since all those calls can be stored at the solutions provider’s data center), and search and use those recordings to improve quality. They can set up alerts to ensure that metrics are being met and thresholds are not being exceeded. They can engage in remote administration of the on-demand call center solution, and they can make fast changes on-the-fly in response to business needs. Workforce management and customer relationship management can be tied into the broader call center platform, increasing the effectiveness of these solutions and providing agents with better resources to solve customers’ issues.

Thanks to call center on-demand technology, companies can accomplish two desired goals that sometimes seem to be mutually exclusive: boosting customer engagement while at the same time improving employee engagement…all while lowering the costs of running a contact center.