Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
The Contact Center Is the Ideal Function for Cloud Deployments
Most companies today use at least one cloud-based enterprise solution. If they’re not IT-savvy, most employees may not even realize it. Once upon a time, a cloud deployment was rare enough to be a “big deal.” Now, with cloud-based applications becoming the norm in people’s personal communications, they may not even understand how their enterprise solutions are being delivered to them.
Companies’ IT, management and operations departments, on the other hand, are certainly aware of it. Chances are, they’re finding that the cost savings from a first cloud implementation were so compelling that they’re looking for other areas in which to deploy the model to keep the savings coming. For many organizations, it makes sense to start with the contact center, one of the most applications-heavy departments in any company. Once again, part of the reason is cost, according to a recent blog post by Valerie Meffert for Thinking Phones Networks. With a hosted contact center solution, companies do not need to purchase their own servers and other hardware – they simply rely upon the vendor’s systems, paying only for the services they actually use.
“This means that firms can not only deploy contact center solutions without a major upfront investment, but also ensures that companies do not inadvertently over-invest in their contact center technology,” wrote Meffert. “In just about every way, cloud-based contact center solutions provide superior performance at lower costs than any alternative approach.”
Contact centers are under pressure today to turn into omnichannel communications centers, and this means a lot of changes are taking place: new communications media, the addition of social media and mobile apps, and a collaborative approach in which everyone in the broader organization can help a customer with specific needs. Most organizations have intensive needs for scheduling personnel to ensure that there are enough workers on the phones in the right channels at the right time. At the same time, IT resources are scarcer from years of budget cutting, and offloading the management of certain applications to a solutions provider takes a great deal of pressure off a company. It’s yet another opportunity for cost savings and improved efficiency, since it’s not exactly a viable option to take on IT personnel for variable work schedules that increase and contract seasonally.
“Contact center needs will vary tremendously over time,” wrote Meffert. “For some seasonal firms, the swings can be extreme, with heavy contact rates during certain months and minimal contact at other times of year. And ideally, as a company expands and grows, it will need to provide support to an increasing number of clients. With traditional contact centers, the only options for organizations are to either over-invest – ensuring that sufficient capabilities are available but also guaranteeing excessive expenses – or under-invest and expect to be unable to meet demand at all times.”
Remote workers are another compelling driver for cloud-based solutions. Companies that can bring home-based or satellite office-based workers into the fold will have extra resources as needed. Without an effective cloud-based solution, scheduling these workers and monitoring their work activity would be nearly impossible. With a cloud solution, managers can see when and where contact center workers are logged in to ensure that the call center’s schedule and skill requirements are being fulfilled.
A feature-rich portfolio of contact center functionality that becomes someone else’s headache when it needs maintenance, added to the ability to “right-size” the application for your specific contact center needs today and tomorrow is the hallmark of a great cloud contact center solution. Most companies will find they’re not going to miss paying harried IT workers overtime to deploy and maintain a premise-based solution that has little flexibility for changing operations, but comes with a huge price tag (News - Alert) before it can even succeed in promoting customer care.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi