The call center industry has seen a kind of leveling in recent years. Once upon a time, the largest of companies that were able to maintain huge, technologically advanced contact centers dominated the call center industry. Smaller companies ran call centers only to try and meet customer expectations, but these call centers were costly for them to run, and rarely accomplished anything except putting out the occasional customer displeasure fire or performing basic customer support functionality. These smaller call centers could never hope to offer their services to large Fortune 500 type companies.
Then…along came the cloud.
Cloud-based contact center solutions are presenting unprecedented opportunities for small call centers to attain the types of functionality they could never hope to afford before: speech recognition, 100-percent call recording, sophisticated workforce management, interaction analytics, “gamified” training solutions, multimedia channels, customizable reporting, flexible interactive voice response (IVR) technology, customer relationship management (CRM) and more. What’s even better is that these companies don’t need a lot of upfront capital – something few of them have – to deploy advanced contact centers.
As a result, the picture has changed today. Smaller call centers aren’t stuck simply putting out fires. Today they have the ability to upsell, cross-sell and expand their customer support to build true customer experience management platforms.
"[The cloud] is a giant killer," Ray Valentine, CTO for call center operator KM2 solutions, told MIS Asia. "It used to be that only very large companies could afford the suite of products that a large client would need—100 percent call recording, screen capture, advanced IVR and CTI (News - Alert) integration. Those were expensive tools with long-term commitments. With cloud solutions, a smaller company can compete with larger organizations."
Valentine noted that software that could expand and contract based on business needs can enable smaller call centers to serve a number of vertical industries, and much larger clients than ever before. It’s critical, however, that smaller call centers find reliable technology partners rather than a company that will install a cloud-based solution and then disappear.
Cloud contact center solutions providers such as 8x8 (News - Alert), Inc. and its Virtual Contact Center offer contact centers a software-as-a-service or hosted approach, allowing them to immediately launch new contact center capabilities for a low monthly fee with no hardware expense other than phones and computers, no software licensing fees, and no implementation or maintenance team to hire. Users can have access to advanced call center functionality such as skills-based routing, multimedia management, real-time monitoring and reporting, CRM integration, 100-percent call recording, Web callback and more.
Thanks to the cloud, smaller call centers are better able to compete, whether they are in-house call center or a services provider. After years of living business opportunities on the table because they simply didn’t have the functionality to do it justice, these smaller companies are now able to give the big boys a run for their money.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey