Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Cloud Revolution to Help SMBs Improve Customer Experiences
You’d think that with all that’s being written about contact centers and cloud-based technology, that it’s the norm in most organizations today. The truth is that more than three quarters of contact centers are still using premise based solutions, according to a 2014 North American Call Center Survey. The good news is that of the companies surveyed, 70 percent have respondents had plans to move to cloud very soon.
While the interest is likely rooted in cost savings, these aren’t the only benefits for a contact center to move to the cloud. It allows for unprecedented flexibility and mobility, allowing for remote, home-based and traveling workers to be part of the broader contact center. As customers demand more multichannel options – even to the point of demanding the ability to switch channels in mid-transaction – it’s simply not possible to meet these needs with a series of parallel, premise-based solutions that are either poorly integrated or not integrated at all. Only the largest companies with the biggest budgets can build an effective omnichannel customer experience using premise-based solutions. Without the cloud, however, smaller and mid-sized contact centers would struggle to keep up with today’s challenges, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo. The challenges include leveraging multichannel communication, and managing customer and contact center data.
“The cloud brings these capabilities within their reach through a subscription-based model without a large upfront investment,” wrote Ciarlo. “With the cloud, every call center regardless of size or type can have the technology it needs to provide excellent customer service, improve policies and procedures, anticipate call volume spikes and plan accordingly, and provide agents with the tools they need to engage with customers.”
Cloud-based, integrated workforce management and workforce optimization solutions can often provide enormous benefits quickly to the average contact center today. By being able to perform better forecasting and scheduling and use outside workers to help fill in the gaps, contact centers can raise their quality of service, expand their reach and lower their costs all at the same time. They can even pull data from more sources to build a more realistic picture of operations, and use sophisticated reporting and alert capabilities to ensure that issues are resolved before they turn into large problems. Ciarlo calls the advent of cloud contact center solutions a new revolution in the contact center.
“The cloud revolution is upon us,” he wrote. “And those contact centers that are using the cloud environment for integrated workforce management, workforce optimization and multichannel capabilities are those most ready for the challenges of 2016 and beyond.”
Edited by Stefania Viscusi