Is your legacy contact centre costing you money and customers?
Legacy “hosted” contact centres have been built using monolithic architectures. These older architectures penalise innovation and limit modifications by requiring developers to build and deploying entirely new versions. This style of platform results in downtime, testing complexity, multiple sets of admins, multiple sets of IT infrastructure, multiple apps to use, learn, maintain and pay for.
Cloud-enabled platforms are designed to be deployed in traditional data centres. Many of these platforms have retrofitted hardware based on legacy systems and are sold as “cloud”, but in reality they are only an imitation and fall short. These platforms are still restricted to premise-based connections.
Solutions native to the cloud are designed and built to work in a connected, online contact centre world. They deliver more efficient and lower cost, web-centric capabilities that enable call centres to improve customer engagement and service, scalability, and endless customisation.
To win in the modern world, the best tool available is technology that is continuously updated, accessed virtually, and seamlessly interconnected. That functionality only exists with cloud-native so lets take a look at some of the benefits
Reduce IT Spend
According to research by Vanson Bourne, companies that move applications to the cloud typically reduce IT spending by 15%.
With a cloud-based contact centre, you’ll avoid purchasing, maintaining and upgrading multiple software applications and the hardware to run them. You can also repurpose staff and facilities for other functions.
On-premises systems require the same level of hardware and software despite fluctuating volume due to seasonality. And if the system fails, you need additional equipment to provide redundancy and failover.
These requirements complicate the operation of your infrastructure, and it takes skilled people to manage it.
Cloud solutions handle peak capacity and redundancy for you, saving the cost of purchasing hardware you will rarely use and paying specialists to manage it.
Uptime - Anywhere, Anytime
A cornerstone of delivering top-notch customer experience is that you’re available to your customers when and where they need you. If your customers can’t reach you to get what they need, they’ll go elsewhere.
The thing about servers is they go down. Any contact centre using an on-premises solution has to maintain not just the servers they need but also extras to take over if one fails. That’s an additional headache. You need to trust your contact centre will be up and running when you need it.
Cloud-based contact centre solutions include automatic fail-over in their infrastructure and may guarantee uptime.
Further, they’re designed for disaster recovery. Many providers have distributed systems that mitigate the risk of a natural or man-made emergency in one area from affecting the whole business
Streamline your Applications - Omnichannel
With many legacy systems it’s hard to get all the systems in your contact centre working well together. Often, agents are flipping from one application to another in a single call, which means they might not easily get all the customer information they need. Agents don’t see the full customer journey.
When cloud contact centres integrate with third-party applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems, agents can access customer information, preferences and past contacts on their desktop without hopping from one data source to another. Representatives can knowledgeably help customers with less effort.
CRM data can also help route people to the best department or employee based on open support tickets, past interactions or lifetime customer value.
Cloud solutions can also more easily integrate communications channels, so customers can reach you via the phone, text, email, chat or social media personal messaging.
Any Agent Anywhere
With legacy systems you are usually much tied down to where you locate your workforce.
With cloud contact centres your agents have flexibility of multiple interfaces such as browser, desktop application or mobile application and which gives them the option to work from the office, from home or even from the bus.
Combined with Omnichannel this allows you to really optimise your agent resources.
Change and adapt quickly
Typically, it takes a lot of time and effort to change on-premises contact centre systems. Just adding prompts to the IVR or opening a new call destination can turn into a major project.
Also, with 40% of customers preferring the phone for complex interactions, out-of-date applications can damage your brand.
Cloud contact centres can address this challenge with intuitive design tools that often require no coding skills. You can quickly update the IVR and even revamp phone automation to serve people faster. Templates for interaction flows reduce the effort required to change how you handle and route contacts.
Call reporting supplements the testing so you can keep an eye on routing and automation success over time.
Cloud contact centres also position you well for adapting to changing customer preferences. With cloud flexibility, you can easily add in new automation or functionality across channels.
You can also add new channels and integrate them into current systems without major infrastructures changes
Recruit Globally
With your contact centre in the cloud, it’s easy to add remote agents. They just need an internet connection and a web browser to see the same desktop information as on-site employees and help customers via any channel.
Managers can monitor their calls, send support messages, assign training videos and conduct coaching sessions for mobile agents through the same web-based applications.
A Global Workplace Analytics meta-study found that telework has improved retention rates for most companies, which saves the cost of hiring and training new employees.
When you can search globally for the most skilled employees, you hire people with the best experience and knowledge of your industry.
A higher-skilled workforce improves performance overall and saves training costs.
Learn More
If you would like to learn more about our Next Generation Cloud Contact Centre application just click the button and book a demo with us. Give it a go .... we don't bite.
The Mercuricall Group, based in Europe and the USA, operates internationally. We are a providers of Next Generation Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) software. See more Mercuricall articles on contact centre related topics by clicking here.
