As contact centers increasingly adopt cloud-based platforms, they are finding that they’re getting more than simply a call center solution that’s more affordable. The cloud offers multiple benefits to contact centers, including broader feature sets, flexibility with locating agents geographically and lower administration costs. One of the most coveted benefits of the cloud, however, is the easier integration these solutions offer compared to premise-based systems.

Many of today’s solutions offer cloud application programming interfaces (APIs) that use Web services technology to enable advanced software integrations with other applications and services. These cloud APIs facilitate a direct connection between the contact center and enterprise systems agents and managers need to ensure customers are supported to the best of a company’s ability. Integration with a cloud solution is a matter of hours or days rather than the months or even years premise-based contact center solutions demand.

According to cloud contact center solutions providers, this frees up a multitude of financial and human resources that can be put to better use improving the customer experience.

“With that level of cloud contact center domain expertise, you can put your current challenges behind you—the days of depleting budgets, wasting IT resources, and taking forever just trying to build integrations to access all your data assets,” according to Five9.

Cloud APIs can be designed for all user applications, including agent and manager, and for functions such as administration, customer relationship management (CRM), billing and reporting. They provide integrated agent desktop access to all the computer telephony integration (CTI (News - Alert)) and telephony features included in the virtual contact center platform.

For the purpose of reporting, cloud APIs can allow users to retrieve call log and agent audit reporting data and present it in a customized way to individual users so they can make the most out of the intelligence they are seeing, making changes on the fly and tweaking operations so they suit the real levels of call volume.

To ensure that everyone in the contact center is on the same page and seeing the contact center data they need, statistics APIs can support applications that access data and then display the information in real-time on wallboards, agent desktops and real-time, customized notifications and alerts.

Your contact center exists to support customers, not to navigate the stormy waters of integration and figure out how to put round pegs in square holes. If you’re spending too much time on integration, a cloud-based solution can help overcome these problems and allow the contact center to move into this century.