5 steps to creating a cloud call centre for your business

More businesses are moving their traditional on-premise contact centres to the cloud not only because of financial benefits but because they offer greater flexibility and scalability. While moving your contact centre to the cloud will improve customer service, staffing efficiency and agent performance, it’s important that the process is seamless and easy. Before choosing a virtual contact centre provider, we suggest you reflect on the following.

Before you start to evaluate virtual contact centre providers and platforms, it’s important to have clarity around what your business needs are and the opportunity costs of not moving to the cloud. We suggest you consider:

It’s useful for companies that still have on-premise contact centres to identify the gaps in their current system that can affect delivery of seamless customer service. Things to consider include:

When your company moves its on-premise contact centre to the cloud, you get instant access to up to date technology and innovation. It’s important to note that traditional contact centres may be using out of date technology that could be affecting customer service and business efficiency. Having a virtual contact centre ensures your business uses state of the art software to keep its competitive edge.

Did you know that a cloud based contact centre gives you real-time control that can be accessed from any device via a secure web browser? With real-time control you can say goodbye to sending requests for:

With an easy to use web interface, your Contact Centre Managers can make changes instantly to meet customer demands.

A cloud based contact centre delivers contact centre functionalities via the Internet from infrastructures owned by a service provider. A cloud customer service solution offers the ability to use different channels including voice, email, chat, social media and mobile applications to interact with service agents. Unlike hosted contact centre solutions, a virtual contact centre offers scalability and ease of increasing capacity to meet demands. Advantages of moving your contact centre to the cloud include the following.

When you move to a cloud call centre, your business will save money. Unlike on-premise contact centres your agents only need to have a computer, headset and access to the Internet. Say goodbye to the expense of out-dated proprietary on-premise platforms, hardware and software upgrades. With a virtual contact centre, your provider takes care of all of this for you. Another cost advantage is that your agents can work remotely or from home if they have an Internet connection.
Some of the biggest savings result from the supplier providing and managing the equipment including:

And when your business moves to the cloud, you won’t need to invest a lot of capital for licensing agreements. Cloud contact centres deliver cost savings with cost effective, flexible licensing agreements.

When your company has a cloud based call centre, your customers can choose how they want to communicate with you. From voice to email or chat and social media, all previous customer interactions can be tracked across every channel for efficiency, customer satisfaction and advisor job satisfaction.
Moving to the cloud also helps businesses improve their customer centric focus while delivering an improved customer service experience. Live call monitoring ensures your Call Centre Managers can listen to calls in progress to give them insights into how your agents are communicating with customers. And with the added benefit of “listen and barge” your agents can be coached and trained while on a call.

Did you know that virtual contact centres give your company built-in protection to maintain operations if your business suffers an outage because of operational failures or weather emergencies? In the event of a disaster, the cloud ensures your business can easily move operations to another location, log in and be operational again. Calls can be easily routed to agents and facilities that aren’t affected by outages or the disaster.

But what happens if your provider has a disaster? They can easily and seamlessly enable disaster recovery from another data centre because they have failover and redundancy functions in the cloud.

When your company has a cloud contact centre, you get the ability to integrate and automate business processes with other critical solutions such as ERM, CRM, and other databases. And with your advisors having real time information at their fingertips, without switching between applications, they can deliver superior customer service. A cloud based contact centre is adaptable to seasonal surges and frees your business from the restrictions of legacy on-premise solutions. Because you only pay for what you use your company has access to the best available technology. On-premise contact centres usually have a traditional IT infrastructure, which requires software updates to be performed by the IT team. This can result in a competitive disadvantage if your agents aren’t using the best software available.

The number of advisors available to answer calls and the number of lines into the building usually limits traditional premises-based contact centre systems. With cloud contact centres, callers can be held in queues in the cloud and offered to the first available advisor. And because a contact centre based in the cloud is independent of location, hardware, software and advisor location, your customers will never get a busy or engaged tone.

Working from home or remotely is easy with a cloud based contact centre and gives your company the flexibility to recruit from a wider pool of advisor talent. And because the IT requirements for your cloud based contact centre is looked after by your provider, you won’t have a huge drain on your IT budget or have to hire expensive external IT support.

When your company is looking for a cloud-based contact center solution, we believe it’s important to focus on improving business efficiency and delivering superior customer service. 8×8 Virtual Contact Center provides all the advanced communication tools required to deliver world-class customer service. We advise and consult in the migration of on-premise solutions to the cloud and deliver a seamless and stress-free transition with the aid of our:

Our 4 contact center options can be tailored to meet the needs of any size business including:

1. Digital Edition: With email and chat channels, pre-built CRM integration, dashboard analytics and reports
2. Standard Edition: Has voice channel with standard IVR, queued call back, dashboard analytics and reports
3. Pro-Edition: With full multi-channel capabilities, enhanced IVR (custom apps), proactive chat and co-browse
4. Ultimate Edition: Contains all the features of 8×8 Virtual Contact Center Pro plus quality management and preview dialer

Since 2002 Arrow have been the leading cloud contact centre and unified communications providers. With access to a top tier suite of solutions and providers, we’ve delivered virtual contact centre solutions to thousands of medium and large Australian businesses. Find out how 8×8 Virtual Contact Center can help improve customer experience, cut costs and increase productivity.