The more people learn about your business, the more they want to connect in every way possible: Email. Chat. Social Media. Self-service. Phone. The danger is, if you’re not careful, you can lose potential customers who might get lost along the way. If their calls go straight to voicemail, or worse, they find no way to connect on their channel of choice, they may get frustrated and find someone else to work with.
If your customers are frustrated with getting in contact with you, it may be time to invest in the Swiss Army Knife of communications—the cloud contact center. Give every customer the chance to connect the way they want to, by bringing all of your communications together through a single web-based interface. With a solution that integrates both communications and customer data, you’ll not only improve employee productivity but drive your competitive advantage by delivering stellar experiences with every contact.
The biggest difference between a traditional contact center and a cloud contact center is how you manage the technology. For example, those operating a traditional contact center will likely have both more control and more responsibility for the operations and maintenance of their contact center system. Using a cloud contact center typically involves offloading some or all of the operations and maintenance of the system to third-parties, often as part of a subscription plan that's handled as OpEx instead of CapEx.
What are the Benefits of Cloud-Based Contact Center Solutions?
Your customers desire a memorable experience, and you want to give it to them. So, deliver one worthy of this hyper-connected generation by interacting through voice, email, chat, even SMS. Keep your door, and their options, open with a cloud contact center, so they will have every opportunity to talk to you and no reason not to.
Your business moves fast, so the tools you use should be just as agile. By housing your services, features and applications in the cloud, your employees can deliver the same great customer experience anywhere. You’ll also be able to scale easily, anytime, anywhere, so you can meet seasonality and growth head on.
Whether it’s time or money, you can be doing better things with your budget than spending it on a server or additional software. With everything you need integrated into a single solution that’s hosted in the cloud, you can deliver an exceptional customer experience while spending minimally.
Not sure if you’re ready to upgrade? Here are some tell-tale signs that you need a cloud contact center.
Your IT team is responsible for making your business work seamlessly across multiple processes. But when it spends more time managing multiple disconnected applications, it loses focus on the strategic initiatives that drive growth.
With a cloud contact center that works straight out of the box, IT teams can take advantage of pre-built integrations and open APIs to customize your contact center to your company’s unique needs. They can stop troubleshooting problems and spend way less time setting up, and start concentrating on adapting and scaling your operations as the business grows. Rather than lose time adding users or retrofitting tools to handle modern communications needs, they can focus on high-value projects. And with a solution that’s achieved high standards and certifications for security and compliance, they don’t have to lose sleep over keeping the system safe.
If your support team must access multiple applications and databases to resolve issues, agents may find it difficult to keep track of their customers’ information and inquiries across different channels. Without customer profile integration, reps are often left in the dark about a customer’s questions and preferences, which results in more drawn-out, unprofessional experiences. That, in turn, leads to increased frustration and decreased customer satisfaction.
A cloud contact center enables you to integrate your CRM, so agents have ready access to essential customer information directly from their communications tools. Using native dialing, call-detail reporting and contact information retrieval as part of their customer service workflow, agents will not only know who is calling, but why they’re calling.
This single resource becomes even more powerful when combined with advanced routing capabilities. Calls, chat messages, emails and faxes can be directed to the agent best suited to meet each individual customer’s unique demands.
That brings us to another challenge: What happens when agents need the expertise of a subject matter expert to resolve an urgent customer issue? Today’s employees are mobile and often away from their desks, but the faster agents can connect with the right colleague, the happier they’ll make customers.
Cloud contact centers enable teams to become more productive and collaborative. Desktop and mobile flexibility allow them to stay in touch even when they’re on the go. They can jump on an impromptu video conference or field instant messages regarding a customer inquiry. This kind of prompt collaboration leads to more customer issues being resolved on the first contact.
Loyal customers are the heart of every successful business. But in today’s highly competitive market, great products and services aren’t enough to earn that loyalty. Customers expect engagement and high-quality interactions in their channels of choice, and they’re more likely to stick with companies that exceed their expectations over and over. It’s no wonder that more than 80 percent of businesses say they expect to compete mainly on customer experience, according to a Gartner survey of marketing leaders.
That’s another reason why your business needs a solution that offers faster, easier ways for customers to connect and get answers. With options like self-service, click-to-call-back and web chat integrated into its phone system, your contact center team has all the tools necessary to amaze your clientele.
As you expand your customer base and deepen its loyalty, your business will face a welcome problem: growth. Not to worry. A cloud contact center scales easily, allowing you to add new agents without disrupting workflows or requiring IT help.
What’s more, a single, intuitive application makes training painless, so your agents will be ready to reach customers across multiple channels more quickly than ever.
Finally, another good problem to have: Success breeds competition. To maintain an advantage, you’ve got to put the customer first and invest in innovative solutions. A cloud contact center helps you do both. Cloud solutions have only been implemented in 50 percent of mid-sized contact centers worldwide, according to an IDC survey. At the same time, more than 70 percent of the organizations implementing cloud-based applications have benefited from an improved customer experience. By investing early, you can stay ahead of the competition.
As your business grows, the pressure to wow customers and outpace competitors will require agility and responsiveness. With a cloud contact center, you’ll increase agent productivity, streamline communications and truly impress every customer.
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