Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
The Cloud Delivery Model Can Reduce Headaches Across the Contact Center
Venturing into the unknown can be pretty scary. While more and more enterprises are putting their telecom functions into the cloud, for some companies, fear of the unknown is causing anxiety. It shouldn’t. In fact, moving to cloud-based models for contact center functions such as workforce management and call recording has been proven to actually reduce headaches and anxiety.
“Hosting contact centers in the cloud has also been known to significantly reduce aspirin and other pain relief usage among managers, as it eliminates many of the headache causes that used to be unavoidable in this business, from hardware failures and networking issues to the budget-bursting costs of maintaining an IT department and keeping up with new software versions,” wrote Chuck Ciarlo, CEO of workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software (News - Alert) in a recent blog post.
The best candidates for movement into the contact center cloud include the following functions:
Call recording. If your contact center records, you’ll know that simply storing the call recordings is cumbersome. Try to use them for performance- and quality-management functions, and the headache compounds.
“In the pre-cloud era, adding call recording required the installation of an onsite PBX (News - Alert) system with a VoIP packet that recorded calls onto a separate onsite platform,” wrote Ciarlo. “With the cloud? Installation for agents can be achieved with the click of a button.”
Workforce management. With premise-based workforce management, you can manage only one location at a time. In the cloud, you can build a virtual contact center that might be distributed throughout multiple offices or even agents’ homes. Schedules and forecasts can be created from anywhere and distributed even to offsite workers or mobile workers on the road.
Omnichannel customer service. Let’s face it: the idea of building an omnichannel contact center platform by stringing together a bunch of unrelated channels that don’t naturally integrate with one another should keep anyone up at night. Thanks to cloud-based platforms today, however, companies can literally purchase precisely the right resources that they require to service customers via telephone, Web, mobile app and even social media.
“With the cloud you’ll be able to achieve customer communication via phone, email or online chat,” wrote Ciarlo. “If you do not have all these channels integrated now, prepare your agents for what that will be like, and how to route customer contacts appropriately for the best service.”
Analytics. Today, most contact centers have vast amounts of data. Most of it is meaningless, however, unless you’re using analytics to sort through structured and unstructured data and put it into a usable format. Analytics solutions can benefit workforce management, quality management, scheduling and forecasting, call routing and any number of customer support functions, and the best place to attain the robust analytics capabilities required are through a cloud-based solution.
So What’s Holding Companies Back?
Fear of the unknown is one great element holding companies back from using the cloud model. Another is a perception that security of sensitive information is less robust than with a premise-based solution. According to Monet, the opposite is actually true.
“Cloud solutions are actually more reliable than hardware-based technology because of their built in fail-safes and redundancies,” wrote the company in a recent white paper. “When all of your equipment is in one place and something goes wrong, you are out of luck. With the decentralized nature of the cloud, even a power outage won’t shut you down.”
If your goal for this year is to reduce headaches, complexity and down-time in the contact center, it should be the year you approach the cloud to begin solving some of your biggest problems. The cloud model can provide contact centers large and small with all the advanced functionality they require, and administration and upkeep of the software becomes the best kind of problem there is: someone else’s problem.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi