What is the primary goal of your contact center? Is it to make calls to prospects that you hope to turn into customers? Does it exist to simply take calls from current customers as a customer service initiative? Does it serve all functions where it is the primary contact point and also the sales machine? Whatever the primary goal, the hosted contact center can position your organization for successful performance and growth.

A recent Five9 whitepaper focused on why the cloud is important for the contact center and outlined seven points to keep in mind. Let’s take a look at each one and what they could mean for your long-term strategy.

1. Business Growth – If you truly want to grow your business, you have to either sell more to current clients or acquire new clients. Either way, it can drive revenue and create more opportunity for you. To do so, you need to make contact with your customers in a way that works for them. The hosted contact center gives you the varying options you need to make the right connection.
2. Link Team Members to Information – In the contact center world, the more information you have on hand, the more successful you will be in an interaction. The hosted contact center enables you to integrate your calling efforts with other software and applications on the network so your agents are completely informed regardless of who is on the other end of the interaction.
3. Quality and Coaching – When everything is online, it’s easily accessible to the entire team. That means quality assurance and coaching elements are at the ready and supervisors can easily monitor live calls to assist agents when needed.
4. Reporting and Analysis – Regardless of your primary reason for existence, you have to report on your activities to validate your existence to the decision makers in the organization. This is easy with reporting tools and analysis that captures all activity across the hosted contact center and puts that information into unique reporting tools for you.
5. Workforce Management – You know that your performance is only as good as the professionals you have on the phone. With workforce management easily accessible through the browser and managed as part of the hosted environment, you can forecast accurately and schedule your workforce according to their skills and your needs.
6. Multiple Channels – Your customers don’t always want to connect with you via phone. While it’s still the most popular channel, they may want to use email to send you a request and social media to follow-up on that request. If your channels aren’t integrated, that could turn into a customer service nightmare. This integration is much easier in a hosted environment.
7. Blended Contact Center – If you want to make more contacts each hour, you’ll want a blended environment where agents handle both outcome and inbound calls. When your solution is hosted, you can easily manage both environments, with reporting tools to demonstrate your success.

Use this list to compare in your own environment. Are you doing the things you need to in order to drive the desired results?