Cloud contact centres allow you to save time and money on finding the people and technology required for a call centre. Instead, your contact centre is cloud-based, meaning that people from anywhere in the world can be answering your calls at any given time, without them having to be in your office. Instead of building up your own contact centre, you can focus on your core business.
They are certainly something worth considering, offering significant savings, stream-lined technology, and convenient scalability without you having to invest any money up front. You’ll be saved the need to buy, maintain, and upgrade hardware for your call centres, and you only need to pay for whatever you’re using, generally on a monthly basis, so you aren’t shelling out for products and services which are of no use to you, but you still have available to you tools like predictive dialers, data analysis and reports, and disaster recovery. This is really useful for companies which frequently experience seasonal peaks and troughs, or sudden influx of traffic due to unexpected incidents. There’s no point paying for all of the extra tools which will help you deal with this high volume of calls, if you are only going to need them a few days of the year. Within a matter of hours, or sometimes even minutes, you can ramp up the amount of agents answering your calls – something which would be extremely difficult if you were limited to your on-site staff.
More and more businesses are choosing to make use of the many benefits of cloud contact centres, gaining increased customer satisfaction and retention, and therefore maintaining their customer bases and creating stronger relationships with new and prospective customers.
This is because cloud contact centres allow you to use multi-channel communication to reach your customers in the best, and smoothest way possible. Services offer a combination of email, web chat, and call backs to make it as easy and convenient as possible for customers to communicate with you in the way that suits their needs best. Customers and their demands are changing as technology develops, so to continue to satisfy them, you will need to keep up with the rapid developments in communication.
However, there are still drawbacks and concerns. Interactive Intelligence’s study found that 23% were unsure about the lack of on-site support that this strategy creates. A similar 24% said they thought customers generally did not like communicating with outsourced call centres rather than with the company’s very own. The biggest concern, though, seems to be security, with 43% of people surveyed having worries regarding data security when it comes to using cloud contact centres. You need to make sure that if you do opt to use a cloud contact centre, you do some investigating beforehand: will dedicated or shared hosting be used? Who will be hosting the servers? Where will the servers be hosted? What type of security is in place? And you should always choose a provider who is well-established already, and has the full trust of its current users. They should have sufficient security measures and policies in place to guarantee you against data loss and theft, too.
Cloud contact centres clearly have a great deal of advantages to offer you and your business, but you shouldn’t take lightly the decision to migrate your contact centre infrastructure to the cloud. Make sure you do plenty of research into how much it can really help your specific business, and which service provider is the most suitable for you and your needs, and can fully address your security concerns.
