Jason Roos explains some of the benefits that can be gained by moving to the cloud.
The cloud provides access to ready-made, already installed applications
Traditionally, introducing new technology into your contact centre has been difficult. It required hard work to secure capital investment budget, was fraught with difficulty in obtaining IT resources and even more challenges with the time and effort required from the contact centre team.
The cloud can make life easier by providing access to ready-made, already installed applications delivered to you as a service on a pay-as-you-use basis.
This enables you to gain access to technology that can make a difference, from a point solution such as IVR or call recording through to a complete end-to-end contact centre solution.
It can create a single virtual environment independent of agent location
By leveraging technology that is not tied to a physical location, you can virtualise your contact centre and customer engagements.
Migrating to a cloud contact centre platform enables you to create a single virtual environment independent of the location of agents. Teams across different physical locations can be virtualised to gain economies of scale.
Disparate departments or functions can be combined to deliver a more responsive and one-touch service to clients, and if your operation spans multiple countries, then you can even virtualise across time zones to provide extended hours of service.
It can allow you to divert ‘overflow’ calls to an alternative destination
A cloud contact centre environment also enables you to redefine the role your contact centre plays. Seldom is the contact centre the sole interface to customers, but by leveraging the cloud it could play a more pivotal role.
Let’s consider two simple scenarios. The first scenario is regional branches or retail outlets that your customers call directly. What happens when the branch or outlet is closed or lines are busy? Would it not be good practice to have those calls automatically routed to the contact centre that has both the capacity and the extended hours?
Sticking with this scenario, many of the calls into regional branches or outlets are unlikely to need answering by someone at that physical location. For example, a call regarding store opening hours or how to find a branch could be handled more efficiently by a centralised team.
Jason Roos
The second scenario is looking at the role of a specialist back-office worker such as a claims specialist, customer relations specialist, etc. These people receive calls directly from customers. However, what happens if that person is busy, on holiday, or just away from their desk?
Here intelligent routing can be used to determine if the call can be more effectively dealt with in the contact centre, or to decide who can respond to customers when the specialist is not available.
With thanks to Jason Roos, Chief Executive Officer at Cirrus.
Author: Megan Jones
Published On: 7th May 2014 - Last modified: 18th Sep 2019
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