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Moving to the Cloud Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

by Rick Danos, Director Product Management - Interactive Messaging, CSG International - March 25, 2013

Moving to the Cloud Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

By Rick Danos, Director Product Management – Interactive Messaging, CSG International


As the emphasis on improving the customer experience continues to rise, the contact center is under a microscope. Many organizations across virtually all industries are finding themselves in the uncomfortable spot of spending time and resources on running a contact center – instead of focusing on running their core business.

Until the hosted contact center came along, businesses were stuck between a rock and a hard place: offshoring your contact center meant you saved on labor, but that came at the potential cost of a good customer experience — something that’s been played out time and again in newspapers, via social media channels and in even late night stand-up routines. This model also forced organizations to explain to their leadership team every 3-5 years that more money was needed to pay for new hardware, new software licenses and a robust IT team. All that investment for a status quo customer experience.

Before Cloud technology came to maturity, a premise-based contact center infrastructure was the only option. Whether you needed to customize your system to meet the needs of the business, ensure tight security over customer data or ramp up staffing levels to meet market demand, the on-premise contact center was the only solution. Usually that meant investing for the staff, infrastructure, and overhead to support peak times (holidays, annual fund-raising, elections, natural disasters, etc.) — then eating the costs during low periods.

The hosted, Cloud-based contact center can change all that.

As Cloud technology has eased into maturity, it’s become clear that hosted contact centers are the way forward for businesses interested in reducing capital expenditure and differentiating themselves in terms of excellent customer service. In fact, according to a Ventana Research paper (“The Contact Center in the Cloud,” 2011), those two factors tied for first among the key benefits cited by organizations considering a hosted contact center.

With more service providers now hosting the technology platform and provisioning contact center infrastructures for their clients as a hosted service, the hosted contact center delivers on the promises made by the Cloud – to lower TCO, eliminate costly hardware investments, accelerate time to value, enable remote workers, and ensure the redundancy and security of your infrastructure and customer data.

Cutting Call Center Costs
The contact center has traditionally been synonymous with cost center especially given the capital investments required to maintain hardware and the overhead associated with physical locations. The added impact of industry regulations requires regular software updates and training for contact center staff. Unfortunately, that means less time for customer service training, a primary driver of satisfaction in this age of immediate gratification. Planning for seasonal peaks in contact center activity has also been a major expense. During those times companies are paying for staff, equipment, and office space that they simply don’t need when peak season ends.

According to a Ventana Research paper (“The Contact Center in the Cloud,” 2011), “The majority of contact center managers have less than 10 percent of their annual operating budget to invest in new technologies, so deploying a Cloud-based system offers the chance to meet growing business demands but stay within these limited budgets.” With the cloud, companies can leverage flexible usage arrangements, paying only for what is used. As a result, those resources could go into customer service training for agents, developing improved scripts, or creating innovative new ways to develop happy customers.

Minimizing Security Risks

Data security is a hot topic for business and consumer alike. Today, organizations are expected to maintain tight control over their data so that customer information is as secure as possible. However, operating with an often limited IT staff, chances are the team responsible for security are more likely IT generalists that security specialists. Ask yourself if your IT team is as up-to-date as they could be when it comes to maintaining your data’s security. If not, your organization faces a significant risk. T
he hosted contact center means your security worries are handled by security professionals instead of overburdened in-house IT generalists.

In addition, one of the hosted contact center’s primary benefits is the ease with which it can be integrated with existing systems – even systems and data that are not in the Cloud. In fact, customer data can live behind the firewall without ever being stored in the Cloud. Agents will be able to access the information without ever crossing the line of storing it making for a near worry-free security program. The flexibility of a hosted solution also allows businesses to determine how to customize the platform, how much information should be stored in the Cloud, and how much should be kept behind the firewall.

Find and Keep Better Talent
It’s tough to keep a good workforce, and it’s tougher to keep staffing levels where they need to be, whether you have seasonal peaks in your business or not. Having to hire people from around the physical location of your contact center is a long-standing limitation: you’re restricted to hiring only those candidates who can travel to your premises.

With the Cloud, businesses are freed from having to hire only agents who are required to work in a physical contact center, and can turn their attention to the recruiting, training, and retention of the highest skilled agents possible. Not only can companies recruit from a new pool of nontraditional workers, they can recruit them from just about anywhere!

The Cloud-based contact center is a major driver of the increasing trend of hiring home-based agents. Offering the freedom for agents to work from home can help retain the very best agents and reduce the amount of time spent recruiting new candidates and training new agents.

Improve Customer Service (No, really)

Believe it or not, you can delight your customers with a good contact center experience, simply because it’ll be so different from what’s available out there. Delight them by giving them multiple channels to reach you — not just phone or email, but web chat and text messaging.

Because the hosted environment makes it simple to integrate IVR, email, chat, and SMS into one platform, routing customers between those channels can be managed through one vendor, eliminating the headache of handling multiple vendors with multiple systems — and perhaps more importantly, eliminating the frustration that a multiple-channel experience can cause for your customers. Having all channels integrated into one platform means a seamless experience for both your customers and your agents.

Putting at least part of your contact center operations in the Cloud also means you make it easier for your agents to access your customers’ records — with a thoughtful plan for integrating your systems, all their interactions with your company are right there, even if they’re stored in different systems.

The good news is that moving to the Cloud needn’t be an all-or-nothing decision. You can roll out a pilot project to investigate how the Cloud will work for you before making a full-scale investment. Leveraging the expertise of a hosting partner both minimizes your cost and the risk of investing in a new model.

Cloud technology has matured into a solid bet for businesses who want to drive down costs while improving the customer experience. Instead of having to maintain multiple instances of on-premise infrastructures within brick-and-mortar centers, you can leverage home-based agents on the same unified platform as your agents in your physical locations, allowing you to recruit people who might not otherwise be in your pool of applicants — and who might just be better agents. You can give your customers more channels to reach you than they might currently have — including video, web chat sessions, and even SMS/text messaging. And best of all, you can stop paying to update your hardware every few years, and let someone else take over updating your software. Instead, you can spend your resources on finding and training the best agents possible.

What does all that do for you? It makes your customers happy. And that means never having to say you’re sorry.



 
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