What do you want from your call center technology? This is not an uncommon question to pose to the call center leader and answers may depend greatly on pain points for that particular leader. When it comes to the call center on demand, there are certain capabilities we expect as a result of leveraging the cloud.

A recent My Customer piece highlighted the findings of a Business Systems survey of more than 100 contact center professionals. The resulting report, Customer Service in 2015 demonstrated the importance of technology’s role in the customer experience. Among the participants, 17.9 percent wanted to improve sales performance, the same percentage wanted to reduce staffing costs and 18.9 percent wanted to reduce waste.

While these are all important initiatives across the call center space, the key area participants really want to see the impact is in the customer experience. In fact, improving the customer experience was cited by 62.3 percent of participants as the most important benefit, and another 41.5 percent want to better understand the voice of the customer. These findings point to the value that call center technology can bring across the board, as well as the agent’s understanding of how the customer experience ultimately affects the bottom line.

The findings also point to the importance of technology along the customer journey. For the call center on demand, access to cloud-based technologies actually helps them do their job that much better. For one thing, all customer interaction channels are more easily integrated in cloud-based environments, helping to create the seamless customer experience. Plus, this ensures agents have better access to customer information, making them more informed and better prepared to answer questions and solve problems.

The call center on demand is also less likely to operate in a silo-type environment from the rest of the organization. It’s not uncommon for sales and marketing to exist very separately from the customer service division, yet these agents on the call are often responsible to customer retention. If these agents don’t have access to the tools they need to keep the customer happy, customer churn will increase and sales and marketing have to spend the resources to replace the customer. It’s a dangerous cycle that does not need to exist in the call center on demand.

Clear integration across channels and departments ensures that everyone is on the same page. This not only keeps accurate information at the ready, it also allows for the voice of the customer to be heard across the noise. When your agents are measured according to customer service performance, this is an important source of information. Cloud-based technology allows for the use of integrated apps across multiple channels and platforms so that voice is not only heard, but the information is integrated into products, services and strategies for maximum effect.