10 Reasons to Move Your Contact Centre to the Cloud
Call centres worldwide are moving to hosted contact centre platforms at a rapid pace.
Why are so many companies moving away from owning and managing expensive call centre equipment on site and moving to the Cloud?
Listed below are 10 very compelling reasons.
1. Business Continuity Just last December multiple contact centres in Canada were closed for several days due to severe weather conditions.
What was the cost of having their inbound queues and outbound campaigns come to a halt because of the weather? If those same centres were utilizing a hosted platform as either their primary contact centre or as a back-up, they could have easily had their agents login from home and would not have had to experience any days without productivity.
Hosted providers offer both platform redundancy and carrier redundancy so that there is no single point of failure, delivering better than five 9's of up time.
2. Flexible payment options on contact centre solutions
Cost is typically a major factor in the growth of cloud adoption. That’s because a cloud contact centre will typically offer flexible pricing options. You can choose to pay monthly, at a fixed per user cost, with plans you can mix and match to ensure you only pay for the features that each user needs.
3. Flexibility for a changing workforce or multiple contact centre locations
This is a big reason many companies move to the cloud.
Enjoying the flexibility to use cloud services from anywhere is a very compelling feature and something that is extremely difficult to achieve with legacy on site equipment. The ability to log onto the contact centre from anywhere there is an Internet connection results in a more flexible workforce, and it’s a pain-free solution for deploying to multiple sites.
Since data is securely stored over the internet, it’s easy to unite global offices on a single service and even extend those same services to remote or mobile workers. On site systems often require individual office visits from technicians as part of the install process, so cloud flexibility of this type is certainly worth taking into consideration for a future-proof contact centre.
4. The ability to scale up or down to meet business needs
Business growth can be hard to predict, so many businesses appreciate that a cloud contact centre can quickly increase capacity during busy periods. On the flip side, services can scale down just as simply, meaning you won't pay for extra seats that are only needed temporarily. This makes managing seasonal fluctuations easier as your business grows and you can always add extra seats when you need them on a more permanent basis.
5. Access new call centre features
With a cloud contact centre you’ll always have access to the latest technology. No more lagging behind in software versions or waiting for expensive (and tedious) upgrades. With the cloud, when new features are released, you get access to them faster.
6. Embrace multi channel communications
Research indicates that businesses using on site contact centre systems have the most concerns about multi channel communications. In fact, “the need to better service the multichannel customer” was cited as the second highest driver for those moving to the cloud, with saving on costs being the top concern.
When the same group was asked about key challenges for the coming year, 44% of respondents using on site systems stated “managing the customer experience across multiple channels.” However, zero percent of cloud users shared this concern. This highlights the drawback of using legacy systems to handle these changes in customer behaviours.
There has been a significant shift in how customers are communicating. Businesses that don’t acknowledge this and plan their multi channel strategy accordingly risk falling behind the competition.
7. Outsource compliance issues and focus on your actual business
Industry regulations are a potential minefield. Whether, it's PCI, PIPEDA, ADAD, or any of the others, a good cloud contact centre solution allows you to outsource the headache of these complex compliance issues. Cloud systems are agile and able to adapt to legislation changes very quickly, whereas it can be quite difficult for legacy on site systems to do the same.
8. Security, resilience and seamless failover options without a big IT burden
What happens to your business if disaster strikes?
Most cloud contact centre providers operate from multiple resilient data centres so, in the event of a problem, your service will continue to run and your agents can login from anywhere, whether they’re in the office, on the road, or working from home.
Your service is always online and available.
9. CRM integration with your call centre solutions
Having a single view of the customer is increasingly important. A cloud contact centre system makes CRM integration much simpler. Many cloud systems come with out-of-the-box integration into popular CRM solutions, like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics. Alternatively, you can look at a user-friendly API.
If you’ve had previous struggles with joining up disparate systems, or if your agents are toggling back and forth between screens to get the full customer picture, then the cloud could yield big benefits by merging this all together. Imagine having all of your phone transaction
s automatically logged into your CRM, along with other cross-channel communications. And call recordings of every prior contact could be just a click away within the customer record. That’s reality in the cloud.
10. Access to exclusive and advanced contact centre features
The Cloud is able to keep pace with revolving technology trends in a way that on site systems cannot.
Consider how important it is to stay on top of developments and roll out new features to your contact centre quickly.
While we can't predict the future we know change is rapid and contact centres continue to evolve.
High Tech has partnered with a number of best of breed cloud services providers — data and telecom — and our knowledgeable representatives are always happy to consult on which services would work best for you.
For more information please contact us
Sales: 905 853-2335 ext. 561
sales@hightechcommunications.ca
