Top Five Things to Look For in a Cloud Solution
In today’s consumer driven marketplace, customer experience is everything. As such contact centres are more important than ever to ensure optimal customer service and the scalable growth of your business. Choosing a contact centre model that is a good fit for your business is one of the most important decisions you can make. A good contact centre experience for your customers can mean the difference between success and failure for your business.
Why are businesses moving to virtual contact centres?
Traditional contact centres are costly capital expenditure assets that do not allow for real-time changes in software, scalability, features or workforce location. They require costly hardware upgrades and a team of IT professionals, just to keep running. When call volumes spike or your business just grows quickly, old school call centres can cost more than just capex – they can leave your customers with a busy signal and a negative experience
Today, to maintain a competitive edge in ‘customer experience’, contact centres have become more relevant than ever before – and more sophisticated than ever before. Here are the top five features a virtual contact centre for your business should have:
1. Pay-as-you-go pricing model: Usage-based models allow your business to scale to capacity almost instantly. This means that if your business is growing rapidly, expensive IT infrastructure and a larger IT team need not stand in the way. It also means that your business can easily handle seasonal spikes in call volumes that overwhelm traditional call centres.
2. Collaboration: The days of buying a software licence and just hoping that your vendor is still in business down the road for the inevitable (and expensive) upgrades are long gone. Today’s cloud-based contact centre vendors often take a collaborative, partnership approach that goes hand in hand with the SaaS model. A prospective vendor needs to be willing to work with you to customize the service and guide you towards best practice – and listen to you and your needs / business priorities while working to develop new features.
3. Reporting: Not just system usage reporting; we’re talking about real-time, daily customer campaign tracking that allows you make adjustments on the fly. A / B testing and the ability to tweak settings is great – but you need relevant, timely data to make proactive – not reactive – changes to campaigns to fix what’s not working or turn up the volume on what is hitting the mark.
4. Integrated: Do your omni-channel customers prefer to get in touch via social media? Maybe your website? Total integration means whatever the channel, you are in control of the customer experience. A good virtual contact centre excels at directing traffic – not just telephone traffic, but omni-channel traffic.
5. Mobile: An important way that virtual contact centres are overcoming a major hurdle for call centres, employee turnover, is with their ability to turn any mobile phone into an instant contact centre. Scale up overnight by activating work-from-home agents and adjust functionality yourself via a smartphone app or web portal. This is the future of virtual contact centres and the future is now.
What are some of the bonus features to explore in a virtual contact centre?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) integration, like Salesforce, along with integrated campaign management, enables even more granular reporting and sales funnel management. If your organization is already using a CRM system, then transferring incoming calls to the right person, at the time, for the right reason is critical to the customer experience.
Predictive dialling, is a feature which removes the noise of busy signals, fax or answering machines and ensures the sales team are free to speak with available customers. This is becoming a must-have feature for organizations looking to keep their IT spend-per-salesperson to a minimum.
Voice-hosted recording is a feature that makes following up a single-click affair. It also applies campaign-specific rules and tracking to messages. The virtual cloud contact centre will have this down to a fine art and will be able to fully integrate follow up it with your CRM system.
Your cloud contact solution should also have Calling Line Identification (CLI) and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) script editing with the option of a self-service portal. Self-service and the ability to turn features on and off without the need for an IT team is one of the most important features of a modern virtual contact centre.
“Along with other SaaS offerings such as email (Google Mail and Yahoo Mail), storage (Google Drive and Dropbox), and desktop applications (Microsoft Office), Virtual Contact Centres (IPScape), are offered in the form of an application on the cloud, that is ready to use, giving your business a way to quickly and efficiently deploy a contact centre solution, to enhance the customer experience, that is scalable with your business.”
Adopting a virtual contact centre now keeps your business ahead of the curve technologically. It also means an immediate ability to extend service hours, lower employee turnover and remove geographical limitations. This all adds up to greater customer satisfaction. Finally, a modern virtual contact centre addresses the historical IT restriction to business growth – CAPEX spending – so your team can focus on exciting and delighting customers instead of maintaining a contact centre.
The bottom line: a virtual contact centre allows you to focus on your core business.