In this Cloud era, many services can run within the Cloud, from email and database applications to logistics management and even contact centre management. Cloud-based services bring many benefits to companies, such as lower total cost of ownership, lower overall on-going operational costs, improved IT department efficiency and productivity, improved business agility, easier scalability and better monitoring. Overall – Cloud brings improved overall business performance, as well as ensuring business development for new market opportunities.
A Cloud Contact Centre system has a critical high speed connectivity and real time web communication, which redefines the contact centre environment that facilitates the strongest performance and the highest quality of services for consumers.
Why do you need to have a Cloud Contact Centre?
1. Ensuring Business Continuity through Disaster Recovery
A Cloud system design does not require physical locations and devices. It provides protection in the event of serious disruptions such as floods, fires and other natural disasters. You can access and move data from almost anywhere. This will be a very significant factor on an organisations disaster recovery performance, as well as key in reducing cost impacts and downtime.
2. Low Upfront Investment
Without the necessity of investing in infrastructure, a Cloud Contact Centre minimises costs. You can start with everything that you need and pay for only what you utilise.
3. High Flexibility on Scalability
Pay for required services or pay-as-you-go, either can be applied to a Cloud Contact Centre and can greatly reduce costs. You don’t have to use a hosted contact centre that requires significant investment to pay for hardware and software upfront. This will also provide you with accurate capacity planning and management.
4. Flexibility in Adding Agents for Seasonal peaks
These benefits will be felt when the workload is seasonally increased and the company requires additional employees, often at short notice. For example, towards the end of the year or during national public holidays. A Cloud Contact Centre solution provides the ease for managers to add employees from remote workstations into their teams. The process can also be very fast to integrate virtual staff into broader contact centre teams because of the addition of Cloud Contact Centre systems with a self-service web portal.
5. Minimal Maintenance and Upgrades Costs
A Cloud Contact Centre provides the ease with which business service maintenances and upgrades are all done by the service provider. Additionally, maintenance, software updates and back up activities in Cloud Contact Centre solutions often no longer require additional fees.
6. Rapid Development
In a Cloud Contact Centre, you no longer need the on-premise IT infrastructure system. You only need three to four weeks for the initial installation and no more waiting for the addition of branches, as this will be done very rapidly and flexibly.
Case Studies
Freedom Insurance, an insurance company from Australia, grew its initial employee count from five agents to 100, with agents handling 1000 calls per day from different locations using Cloud Centre solutions. Cloud Contact Centre solutions make it easier for Freedom Insurance to add staff when the company’s business is growing, simply by scaling their requirements from their service provider. In addition, Freedom Insurance agents can now work from anywhere with regulated work flows through a Cloud Contact Centre (Source: IPScape).
Another example is Laithwaite’s Wine, the world’s largest wine production company, which also uses Cloud Contact Centre to increase the number of employees during peak seasons and reduce the numbers when operating normally. Employees can work remotely, without unnecessarily exposing themselves to additional operating costs (Source: IPScape).
How to Choose the Right Cloud Contact Centre Providers?
Here are a number of criteria in choosing a Cloud Contact Centre provider to ensure that you get the most benefits for your company:
1. Speed of Deployment
Choose a provider that does not make you waste your time, with no more than six weeks of deployment time.
2. Upgrades and New Features Offered
Choose a provider that gives full authority to the organisation to upgrade and access new features automatically, allowing the company to log in to and out of the system with no extra cost.
3. On-Going Cost Structures
A transparent billing system is essential. Operating costs should be charged based on the number of agents who log in to the system. This can be accurately tracked with modern operating systems.
4. Scalability
Cloud Contact Centre providers must have scalability, where customers can have the flexibility to scale up and down, based on seasonal variations.
5. Integration and open APIs
Cloud Contact Centre solutions providers should have an application that can be integrated into on-premise or hosted platforms easily and quickly. Contact Centre vendors must also offer an open API (application programming interface) to enable advanced integrations with other software applications.
6. Multi-tenant architecture
An important benefit of a Cloud system is that it should be designed to be multi-tenant rented. Cloud Contact Centre providers are required to have this system in place.
The presence of Cloud Contact Centre solutions enable you to respond quickly to consumer demands, effortlessly adapt to changes and prepare for serious disruption to services. It is a wise and sound decision for your business and for your clients. Cloud Contact Centre solutions can also improve staff productivity and performance while maintaining a high level of customer experience and at a reduced cost. It enables your company to work together highly efficiently and in an integrated way and helps your company to deliver a responsive, 24/7 service for customers who are located in every global time zone.
(June, 2016)