With so many aspects of business changing since COVID-19, the call center, as we know it, will never be the same again. As customer service and support centers get busier, businesses are rapidly shifting to a more modern and dynamic call center environment.
By integrating an omnichannel approach to meet the ever-changing and demanding needs of customers, companies can stay ahead of market trends. Today’s tech-savvy consumer demands a seamless, personalized, and fast customer experience across a multitude of channels, including social media, email, voice, and the Internet in general. Businesses need an efficient way to respond and communicate with customers that exceed expectations.
The Call Center in the Digital Age
Since digital channels take over the way brands and customers communicate, cloud-based contact centers are the key to improving customer experience, satisfaction, and retention. According to DMG Consulting, 62% of organizations have already moved to a cloud-based call center and the numbers continue to rise. With digital transformation initiatives dominating today’s business landscape, you need to move your customer service center to the cloud from an on-premises model to stay competitive and increase efficiency across your organization.
Adopting technologies such as Artificial Intelligence in the call center allows organizations to offer first-rate customer service and increase operational efficiency. Virtual assistants can naturally converse with users and help human agents gather pertinent details to solve the most complex problems that arise through the call center.
An important factor to consider when migrating your contact center to the cloud is partnering with a reliable and experienced telecom operator in business telephony.
Top 5 Benefits of a Cloud-Based Contact Center
1) Rapid Deployment, Implementation and Innovation
With increasing pressure on call centers, a cloud-based solution provides rapid resolution to increase efficiency while offering a robust end-to-end solution, which can be customized to meet the specific needs of an organization. This could include offering live agent support, routing calls, or reducing call center volume by serving customers via voice or chatbots. After deciding which solution is best for your environment, the cloud contact center can be launched in days rather than weeks, facilitating conversations across digital channels.
By hiring a trusted consultant to enable this transition, companies of all sizes and industries can take off even faster and get the expert service and support needed to drive adoption and success. Plus, with specialists who can customize the solution, the possibilities are endless.
The cloud contact center offers the opportunity to quickly create and deploy a custom virtual agent. These agents allow you to offer 24/7 support through voice and chat channels, providing customers with immediate conversational self-service options.
It also integrates with existing call center technology to enable cloud capabilities. It also works through digital channels to provide insights on all call center data to improve customer interactions, creating a satisfying CX. From the automation of interactions and integrations with corporate systems such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Kustomer and custom options.
2) Safety and Reliability
Safety is always a top priority when it comes to business; customers trust organizations to keep their data safe across all channels. Most cloud solutions take advantage of highly available data centers to store data. In addition, there are vital enterprise-level redundancy and failover procedures that improve operational efficiency.
Likewise, the telephone platform, protected and redundant in several data centers, ensures the efficient management of the most demanding flow of simultaneous calls. In addition, version updates are performed automatically in the cloud, without affecting the fluidity of the service.
3) Improved Customer Experience
The level of customer service you offer can affect your business positively or negatively. Delivering a satisfying experience across multiple channels is the foundation and value proposition of a cloud contact center. Customers who engage and have an optimal experience communicating with your brand become brand advocates, which translate to increased customer retention, revenue, and loyalty.
By implementing a cloud contact center, customers can seamlessly interact with your brand in a multi-channel manner by leveraging voice and live chat bots within the web to receive timely resolutions to their problems. By integrating modern and dynamic technologies into the CX, companies can further enhance the customer journey by offering a more personalized interaction.
Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning or Natural Language Processing help decipher user sentiment to determine when dissatisfied callers should be transferred to a live agent.
4) Higher ROI
At a time when companies around the world are facing even greater pressure to deliver fast and efficient services with reduced resources, using call center software that reduces costs without sacrificing customer experience is the most crucial step in the transformation of the call center.
Significant ROI can be found by determining which transactions are more complex than an automated IVR system can handle, but are not so complex that they require the assistance of a human agent. Intuitive AI-powered virtual agents can handle many of these “middle ground” customer interactions efficiently and profitably. The return on investment comes from taking those interactions away from human agents and consequently freeing them up for the interactions that are best served by live customer service agents. Streamlined integration of IVR technology for basic interactions, AI virtual agents for more day-to-day inquiries, and human agents for more complex interactions can create efficiencies that drive an ROI from a call center transformation.
5) Scalability and Flexibility
As a business grows and evolves, your cloud-based contact center does too. During peak periods, crises or other events involving a greater influx of incoming calls, agents can easily be added to the call center.
A cloud contact center supports a remote workforce critical in today’s changing world. Staff can work from any location or device, so customers are never without answers.
From integrating AI and machine learning in call center transformation to delivering exceptional customer service while increasing operational efficiency and ROI, cloud-based contact center solutions live up to expectations.
By using cloud-based technology, there are ways to expand capabilities to include account authentication and back-end system integrations that give those virtual agents more power to address a broader set of customer requests. Those same virtual agents can also be expanded to additional channels: voice, live chat, social networks, etc. to deliver an integrated customer experience.