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If you've been thinking about scaling up your business, customer service is key. Whatever ideas you have in mind, gauge how they improve your customer service. In these changing times, your business has to stay upfront with dynamic work environments. Take, for instance, the pandemic and its effects on how we work.

Some services affected include customer service, because of measures affecting workers. To avoid this you can consider cloud contact centers as an option. They are cost-cutting, easy to set up, and your employees will be able to continue working remotely, and providing excellent customer service.

What Is A Cloud Contact Center?

A cloud contact center is a telecommunications setup that relies solely on the internet. Its advantages include managing inbound and outbound calls over the internet, email, chat, social media integrations and voice for seamless communication. Therefore, it improves customer experience. Third-party entities offer the service to businesses through subscription plans.

Cloud services store all data involved in the communication process on the cloud. Hence, workers can operate the system at home, with minimal equipment. It is a plug and play situation, with customized CRM interfaces designed for your business needs.

With a cloud contact center in place, businesses no longer have to worry about communication. Such a center saves you costs relating to hardware, infrastructure, supplies, maintenance, and more, let me tell you about some of them:

5 Reasons To Move To A Cloud Contact Center

1. Easy Scalability

Businesses grow fast, and sometimes it’s hard to catch up. Scaling up has proven to be more difficult with legacy or traditional contact centers. Sometimes, a very complex, expensive and hard-to-maintain infrastructure is required for a task as simple as adding a new channel or user.

With a cloud contact center, changes take place just by clicking an option. Adding up a new channel, or upgrading your messaging system happens in no time. The fact that they are dedicated to one service translates to faster response times. Most providers invest in research, giving useful suggestions on how you can best optimize your contact center and innovating these technologies.

2. Better Customer Experience

As indicated earlier, customer experience is at the core of any investment made by businesses. Improving your contact center is no exception and taking it to the cloud will be advantageous. Customers will no longer get annoyed for being put on hold as the internet works more smoothly.

You will be able to provide support faster, respond to customer concerns, make the most out of lead generation, program follow-ups, test customer loyalty programs and benefits, make sales, etc. All of this in one place, and even better: with all data available for you to monitor, assess and take appropriate action towards better customer service.

3. Artificial Intelligence Integration

Artificial Intelligence is an inevitable wave that you do not want to ride against. Cloud contact centers are increasingly leveraging on its capability to automate processes. Its potential uses range from chatbots to data collection and simple request handling all the way to predictive modelling and customized features. These services give businesses a better picture of what to expect in terms of results and goals.

While some legacy systems are capable of AI integration, they need specialized expertise and are hard to relocate. Also, the software involved needs to be scalability-friendly as that offered on most cloud services. Investing in a cloud contact center guarantees easy integration with future improvements of AI.

4. Improved Reliability

With traditional phones, interruptions as simple as power outages will keep affecting you. Where you have no backup systems, a breakdown would mean hours of customer service lost. This keeps you on your toes as you often seek to recover and undo any damages.

Meanwhile, cloud contact centers have multiple backup systems ensuring service throughout. Your 24/7 service claim is achievable and possible if you are running on the cloud. Even where one support agent faces hitches, another one will be able to help for the system to remain online.

5. Reduced Operational Costs With Higher ROI

Running a cloud contact center is less expensive compared to legacy systems. The fact that you can upscale and downscale according to your business needs is quite appealing. Any investments made on the system get based on your specific needs. Thus, no resource waste and higher ROI.

Since companies offering cloud services do so on a large scale, operating costs are very low. Running a contact center online therefore costs a fraction compared to what it would cost on a building. Not to mention all the benefits of future software integration friendliness, cloud security and space saving.

Considerations When Setting Up A Cloud Contact Center

When setting up a cloud contact center there are several questions you should ask yourself. They help in determining what tweaks you need to get the very best from your setup.

• Permission and privileges: It’s important that you set up permissions to the different users. In order to do this, you should build profiles according to the features each employee needs to use. You can also divide in groups as needed and assign permissions collectively.
• Managed or unmanaged service: You’ll need to consider the managing costs and staff required. Being on the same page from the beginning is necessary for both your business and the contact center. Unmanaged services are of course lower in cost. Takt yourself time to understand the system thoroughly, pick features accordingly, and think about the easiness of the system to be explained in onboarding programs.
• Training: In order to get the best results, your employees need to know how the system works. It is upon you to set up the training protocols. Depending on needs and cost you can opt to outsource the training and onboarding. Most cloud service companies offer training that could save costs. Yet, you need to evaluate often whether your team understands and uses the system optimally. If not, you can come up with customized in-house tutorials.
• Technicalities: Network infrastructure may need upgrading in most instances. Are you up to the task, or you need some help? Luckily, most companies offer onboarding services and help in infrastructure upgrades where needed. Where no such service is offered, you will have to figure it out and get expert help.
• Data collection: Data generated by the system will be your best source of information to improve processes. One way of gathering such data is through customer feedback. You need to set up how it will be collected by setting up questionnaires. However, the system itself also records tons of useful info. Any business analytics that are relevant to you should be considered when choosing a provider.

Conclusion

If you still haven’t migrated your telecommunications to the cloud, make sure to do it rather sooner than later. It’ll help you catch up with trends. Not only do Cloud Contact centers come up with innovative and easy ways of doing and improving things, they actually become a necessity at some point in business expansion.

The earlier you make the switch, the more advantages you will be able to benefit from, and the faster your business will be adapted for the years to come.

With dynamic software, easy API integrations, multi-channel options, AI Automation, Internet of Things we know businesses are increasingly using these technologies in their favor. Finally, take your team on an exciting journey that simplifies their work in the process. They will be glad about it.