If there’s one thing that has become abundantly clear due to the coronavirus pandemic, it’s that your business needs to be always available for customers – even when your employees can’t go into the office. Especially in times of uncertainty, customers see your agents as a crucial helpline to answer their queries and reassure them. As a matter of fact, overall conversation volume in contact centres jumped by about 20% during the first few months of the pandemic.
Moreover, customer interactions also changed during the pandemic: with on hold times reaching unbearable highs, especially in hospitality and healthcare, more and more consumers turned to digital channels to solve their issues – a trend that is likely to last for years to come.
Whether your business was ready or not to face the pandemic, it’s undeniable that being prepared for any unforeseen circumstance is critical to your customer service and business success.
The easiest way to overcome all your customer service challenges? Embracing a cloud-based contact centre solution.
With studies predicting as many as 70% of contact centres moving to the cloud in the next two years, now it’s the perfect time to make the move and reap the benefits of this technology.
5 benefits of moving to a cloud contact centre solution
Remote working
With more and more agents preferring a remote working environment, ensuring they can help your customers regardless of their location has never been so important. A cloud-based contact centre solution provides your agents with all they need to provide top-notch customer service – all your agents will need is a reliable internet connection and a browser to do their job.
A remote working environment doesn’t just give your agents more flexibility and in most cases, better work-life balance, but it also benefits your business by widening the talent pool, reducing turnover and increasing agent satisfaction.
Scalable
Between evolving customer behaviours, seasonality and unforeseen circumstances, having the right number of agents to meet customer demands can be difficult.
With a cloud-based contact centre, rigid licensing is a thing of the past – this solution is easily scalable, meaning you can increase or decrease the number of seats depending on your needs and the needs of your customers. This way, you can always ensure you have the right amount of resources and you only pay for what you use.
Easy deployment
Setting up a new on-premise system is always difficult – it often requires hardware to be installed, software to be downloaded, extensive IT resources and overall, a lot of time and effort.
On the other hand, a cloud-based solution is hardware-free, making it easy to deploy and manage – in some cases, it can take only a day to set up. This means you can focus on serving your customers and your IT team doesn’t have to feel burdened by a new system.
Moreover, without all the additional costs associated with on-premise solutions, a cloud contact centre doesn’t require any capital expenditure and is comparatively cheaper.
Better customer experience
Customer should always be at the heart of your business, but providing them with great customer experience can be difficult when your solution is not up to date. On-premise solutions are difficult and expensive to update, leaving your business incapable of meeting customer demands.
A cloud-based contact centre allows you to improve your customer experience with an advanced set of features, often included at no extra cost with your solution. From offering different, yet interconnected, communications channels for your customers to get in touch, to have an advanced queue management system and extensive data, a cloud contact centre will turn your customer experience into a success and will keep your customers happy.
Business continuity
As we’ve mentioned before, now more than ever your customers need to be able to get in touch with you at any time – regardless of what’s happening in the world or whether your office is inaccessible. Think of it this way: when your customers can’t get in touch with you, they’ll look for a solution to their problems elsewhere (i.e., your competitors).
When you move to the cloud, your agents can work from virtually anywhere, without any disruption for your business or your customers. Moreover, you don’t have to worry about on-premise system failures – most contact centre deployed in the cloud rely on different data centres to ensure almost impeccable uptime.
Conclusion
Whether you’re in the process of choosing the right cloud contact centre for your business, or have just started considering it, making the move to the cloud will help you thrive in the new normal.
Customer demands are changing, and with remote working becoming the norm, on-premise systems are not enough anymore to ensure your business has the competitive advantage it needs to succeed.
Cloud-based contact centres are easy to deploy, manage and use – your agents will only require an internet connection to support your customers and provide them with great customer service.
