The popularity of the cloud is ever increasing, through recent years the number of businesses adopting the cloud has continued to increase significantly. If businesses haven’t already migrated and moved their files, services and processes to the cloud it is more than likely that they are planning to. It is the same for contact centres too, it has become more and more common for the cloud to be used as a platform within a call centre setting, and why not? Here are just 4 advantages of the many that using the cloud can offer…
- Cutting Costs
Setting up a physical contact centre is incredibly costly and time consuming, not every company has the resources to finance their own let alone maintain it. Contact centres can incur costs from thousands up to millions depending on their size and how many months or years of work go into working towards their opening. Not forgetting the utilities, salaries of every single worker and not just the agents, even the little things such as refreshments and other perishables that are essential to the daily workings of a contact centre. Introducing a virtual contact centre software system into the mix however can help you to cut down on a lot of these costs. Giving agents the ability and opportunity to work flexibly and even remotely and from home means you don’t need such a large premises to house every single member of staff. With the downsizing of your premises it means you’ll be saving on electricity and other utilities too.
- Flexibility
As pointed out in the last section, migrating your contact centre activities to a platform in the cloud gives agents the opportunity to work from home or somewhere other than the office remotely. All of the files are accessible from anywhere because they’re all online when they’re in the cloud, everyone has access to everything they need while still maintaining the ability to add, log or save any files, details or data into the virtual system as well. With the need of having agents in a physical location eliminated it allows you to seek out more specialist agents. For example, if your centre needed to service German customers or you required someone with detailed knowledge of computers then you have a wider pool of talent to employ from compared to your surrounding area.
- Scalability
Industries are incredibly varied and the needs, wants and requirements of the customers within those sectors equally differ, as a result the peak times in all of these different businesses are different too. For example, Christmas is a typical peak time for retailers where they usually have a lot more queries surrounding product issues at this time, and around admission and clearing time Universities see a rise in the number of people contacting them.
These peak times mean businesses need a lot more capacity to deal with their customer service during these periods and so need to scale up and employ more agents. This can become a costly effort however if you require so many more agents and equipment because you need to find somewhere for them to work and install and maintain equipment you might not need for the rest of the year. This financial strain can be mitigated with the help of the cloud. Any software and systems in the cloud are easily adapted to the requirements of the business, so when the business grows or temporary agents need to be taken on board any software can be altered to suit.
- Customer Service Improvement
There has been major growth over recent years in using multiple channels to deliver great customer service so using multi-channel contact centre software in the cloud is a no-brainer. It allows you to streamline all incoming information from different channels such as Twitter, Facebook, email, telephone and even text messages into a manageable feed in a central location. Having all of this detailed information in one place allows agents to access all of the detail they need to be to deliver exceptional service to customers and support them to the best of their ability.
Find out more about or multi channel communication platforms for the cloud environment