Cloudy with an excellent opportunity of success: why you need to move your contact centre to the cloud
Nicky Hjerpe, Head of Product Marketing at Netcall discusses.
The cloud is changing on a global scale, unleashing $1 trillion in value for Fortune 500 companies alone. 90% of the cloud’s value comes from rapid time-to-market, resiliency, cost saving measures and innovation. The contact centre is a tunnel from a business and its customers, and it is poised to absorb the benefits of the cloud.
Cloud contact centres provide organisations with a rapid, adaptable, scalable, and cost-effective way to deliver personalised experiences and adjust to the swiftly changing consumer demands. In today’s evolvingly competitive landscape where 71% of consumers expect personalised interactions with companies, and 76% are frustrated when they don’t get these.
By leveraging the right solution, better data insights are achieved, enabling superior personalised service, customer engagement and experience are optimised, and operations are future proofed.
It is clear that the best outlook is a ‘cloudy’ one.
Why the cloud is a constant forecast prediction
While in 2019, only 10% of contact centre agents were using Contact Centre-as-a-Service (CCaaS), the pandemic pushed organisations to embrace the flexibility and adaptability of cloud services, so much so that CCaaS will become the preferred deployment option for 60% of new agent positions in 2023.
Before the impacts of Covid-19, many organisations somewhat unaware of the true extent that of the benefits they could bring. Instead, they tended to prefer a traditional, in-house infrastructure to control operations. However, the pandemic forced organisations to move their contact centres to the cloud, as offices around the world were forced to shut their doors.
Empty offices allowed cloud projects to be quickly executed at a time where digitalisation was quickly becoming our future. This avoided dependency on on-premises technology. As cloud contact centres yielded new levels of scalability, agility and cost-effectiveness almost immediately, it became clear that organisations hadn’t just been forced into a short-term migration but rather a long-term upgrade. Nearly three years later, new hybrid forms of working are clearly here to stay, and the cloud-based contact centre’s role has become indispensable.
By adopting cloud-based automation tools, organisations were able to effectively attend to increased volumes of customer enquiries, which were inevitably more time-critical and pressurised during the height of the pandemic.
The pandemic highlighted how, with the cloud, the core role of the contact centre is protected even during the most volatile and testing of times. Routine requests and tasks are handled by automations, leaving workers with the time and resources needed to deal with more complicated cases.
The cloud is here to stay
Whilst we have known the benefits of a cloud-based contact centre for years, it did not become a necessity until the after math of the pandemic. After two years of remote working and anticipated increases in call volumes, moving to the cloud became a priority for global pharmaceutical services and products platform, Clinigen. The company adopted an advanced omnichannel cloud contact centre. The solution’s intuitive interface enabled the company’s new contact centre to be up and running in less than eight weeks. Clinigen was able to consolidate disparate systems and integrate their contact centre solution with Microsoft Teams. The result? Visibility across teams, more effective workflows, and improved customer and employee experiences.
Cairn Housing Group also adopted an advanced omnichannel cloud contact centre in an effort to transform the tenant journey and deliver seamless end-to-end support, building its own online portal for its tenants and enabling self-service so more cases could be processed faster. The portal’s 1st of April, 2020 launch date would have been a problem if not for their cloud-based solution, which allowed the remote working team to still make updates and continue with their rollout plans. Thanks to their cloud-based contact centre, the housing group was able to offer self-service and agent support options; consolidate systems, which provided visibility over tenants’ communications and enabled them to access services in any channel; and increase case management efficiency, resolving customer enquiries faster. Because of the cloud’s ‘work from anywhere’ flexibility, nearly 6,000 cases were processed within four months of launching their own MyCairn portal.
A personal addition goes a long way
Along with scalability, efficiency, agility and cost-effectiveness, the cloud brought personalisation – a real asset of the cloud is its ability to facilitate personal levels of service. The cloud provides a more integrated platform that that accumulates data analytics from around the organisation is accomplished. Through the use of such an AI-powered automation and customer engagement platform, organisations are encouraged with the rich insights needed to inform decision-making capabilities that will deliver the most engaging and satisfactory customer experience.
Unified data and systems allow for a single view of interactions across engagement channels, facilitating omnichannel service and real-time data, ensuring relevant service and faster resolution times.
This was especially important during the height of the pandemic, a time of great discomfort for many. Through a cloud-based contact centre and customer engagement management solution, less forgiving and more expectant consumer enquiries were successfully resolved.
Moving to today, organisations that get personalisation right experience faster rates of revenue growth than those who don’t.
Grappling the storm by the cloud
The cloud’s flexibility also encourages innovation and easily enables new advanced technologies to be integrated. Moreover, traditional, on-premises infrastructures are expensive. Moving contact centres to the cloud lowers total cost of ownership and reduces technical debt.
In today’s economic landscape, it is increasingly difficult for organisations to manage operations with existing resources whilst also remaining competitive. The flexibility and personalisation afforded by a cloud-based contact centre and customer engagement solution not only enables organisations to weather the storm, but rather, it allows them to thrive and differentiate themselves from their peers.
A positive spin
In retrospect, it is good to weigh up the new world for contact centre procedures. The positive impact of cloud migration should come as no surprise. Not only can the cloud provide organisations with resilient ways to deliver services dreamt of, but also offers the ability to adapt quickly to customer demands.
Beyond that leveraging a solution that encompasses the ethics of automation, AI, data visibility, connected communications, the easy future integrations, performance audits and monitoring, and the use of value-add solutions, such as chatbots, means that the potential benefits become even more rewarding.
Better data insight, improved engagement, and an enhanced overall connection to customers are three metrics that will put a business at the top of its game. In light of potential future market shifts or touch economic times, it is reassuring to know that there is stability in the cloud.
Nicky Hjerpe is Head of Product Marketing at Netcall
Netcall is a leading provider of low-code and customer engagement solutions.
A UK company quoted on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange. By enabling customer-facing and IT talent to collaborate, Netcall takes the pain out of substantial change projects, helping businesses dramatically improve the customer experience, while lowering costs.
Over six hundred organisations in financial services, insurance, local government, and healthcare use the Netcall Liberty platform to make life easier for the people they serve. Netcall aims to help organisations radically improve customer experience through collaborative CX.
For additional information on Netcall view their Company Profile
