Fewer contact centers than you might think have moved to the cloud-based contact center model. The ones that have are reporting impressive results.
Reality is that Communications as a Service (CaaS) cloud-based delivery of functionality is in many ways tailor-made for the challenges faced by contact centers. CaaS provides the flexibility for handling things like seasonal call volume and unexpected call spikes that are difficult for premises-based solutions to supply, but for which cloud-based solutions are ideal. In addition, it allows contact centers to move to a “virtual” contact center model, allowing agents to work from their homes or anywhere else in the world. A common term for this is a contact center is free to “inhale and exhale” as needed, expanding to meet needs and contracting to save labor expenditures during slower periods.
However, no one size of cloud solution fits all. Companies that put their contact centers into the cloud, bet it public, private or hybrid, must be careful to choose not just the right solution but the right partner(s) who understand all of the challenges (and opportunities) getting to the best solution for a unique set of circumstances entails.
The proof is in the case studies
Interactive Intelligence’s (News - Alert) cloud-based contact center solutions, has some illustrative recent client successes.
Philips Healthcare, runs a contact center at its U.S. headquarters in Atlanta with about 400 engineers, radiation technologists, and clinical personnel such as nurses. All staff members were tasked with fielding queries from imaging equipment users. At the time, the contact center was supported by a premise-based system that just wasn't meeting the company's needs. With the addition of CaaS Contact Center for multichannel routing and queuing, interactive voice response, unified messaging, and presence management, Philips (News - Alert) Healthcare is reporting true virtualization and the ability to more quickly adapt to changing customer needs. The company is now in the process of rolling out the CaaS solution to contact centers in Japan, Germany and the UK.
New Era Tickets, is an event marketing company that provides ticketing and contact center services for a number of event forums. Though the company realized it could serve customers more cost-effectively and efficiently by expanding touch-points beyond the phone, its existing contact center platform lacked multichannel capabilities. The company transitioned its three call center locations plus a Canadian satellite office to CaaS Contact Center based on the solution's breadth of applications and flexible pricing. The move has paid off for New Era Tickets. Since deploying Interactive Intelligence's CaaS, New Era Tickets has reduced the time needed to perform common contact center tasks: cutting call processing time by as much as 15 seconds, for starters. The company has also benefited from the ease of assigning agent skills, delivering calls, disconnects and presenting next-in-queue calls. The time savings have translated into cost savings for New Era Tickets, which finds it can serve more customers to higher standards on fewer toll-free minutes.
Naviss Direct, offers vehicle protection plans that protect car owners from costly repairs above and beyond the standard manufacturer’s auto warranty. The company, which was expanding rapidly, needed a nimble and scalable contact center solution to accommodate such rapid growth. The company thought it had chosen wisely by deploying a cloud-based contact center solution, but the first solution it chose was not performing well. Customer support for the solution was weak and the company felt it wasn't getting value for its money. In addition, the product lacked an outbound dialer, something Naviss wanted to help it boost revenue. To better meet its needs, Naviss Direct deployed CaaS Contact Center, with follow-on deployments of Interactive Intelligence's cloud-based dialer and multichannel recording applications. With CaaS Contact Center’s real-time supervisory and recording capabilities, Naviss Direct’s ability to track agent performance has greatly improved, as has its ability to effectively manage call recordings. Contact center supervisors are reporting benefits from their new-found ability to fine-tune call center processes, and the cloud-based dialer has helped the comapny finally realize its vision for conducting revenue-generating outbound campaigns.
As the case studies represent, cloud-based contact center solutions not only address a variety of generic needs, but can be customized to meet the requirements of specific vertical markets as well. The numbers and reported increase in performance stand as testimony that cloud-based solutions deliver on improving customer interactions and driving improved business optimization leading to demonstrable bottom line results.
Edited by Peter Bernstein