To succeed as a medium or large business, it’s vital that exceptional customer service is delivered consistently and efficiently. While the number of customers who communicate via web-chats and email is growing, communicating via the telephone is still very important. In the past a business contact center required a team of employees to be housed at a central location. Today more and more businesses are using virtual contact centers to enhance their customer’s experience.

A virtual contact center is a call center that can be run from multiple locations, anywhere in the world. And because your contact center team don’t need to be in a central location, your business can easily scale up or down with minimal cost. A virtual contact center uses state of the art software and technology so your customers will not know that your team is not working from the same location. And with less time spent commuting and the ability to work remotely or from home, research suggests that employees are more productive and efficient than those who work in traditional contact centers.

Why your business needs to have a Virtual Contact Center

Did you know that customers who have a poor experience are four times more likely to move their business elsewhere? For your medium or large business to deliver the best customer service experience possible, it’s vital that you have a virtual contact center.

8×8 Virtual Contact Center is a cloud-based application that provides all the advanced communication tools your business needs for a superior customer service experience. 8×8 Virtual Contact Center allows communication with customers on any media including voice, email and chat channels. Smart call routing ensures agents can work from anywhere and that your customers can be quickly connected. With everything you need in one place 8×8 Virtual Contact Center solution includes:

  • Workforce optimisation
  • Advanced business phone and collaboration services, and
  • Unified communications

With an ability to support voice email and web chat, your customers will be able to interact with your business in a way that suits them. Featuring multilingual web chat and callback options to prevent losing their place in a queue, 8×8 Virtual Contact Center capabilities deliver exceptional customer experiences.

With 8×8 Virtual Contact Center your inbound calls are automatically routed to the nearest data centre. The short distance travelled ensures crystal clear audio clarity without time lag and delays. Quality management, coaching and knowledge sharing is easy with 8×8 Virtual Contact Center as agents and supervisors can tag each other via @mentions. With proper configuration 8×8 Virtual Contact Center in combination with 8×8 Quality Management assists businesses to satisfy security and compliance requirements of:

  • PCI-DSS
  • FISMA
  • Privacy Shield Network
  • HIPAA
  • CPNI
  • Cyber Essentials
  • ISO 27001
  • ISO 9001
  • UK Government ATO

When it comes to improving contact center performance and efficiency, it’s important to have data and insights. 8×8 Virtual Contact Center offers analytics that go beyond the speed of answering a call. The suite of reports and easy to understand dashboard gives your business deep dive information about how you’re serving your customers.

8×8 Virtual Contact Center reporting metrics include:

  • How much time agents are spending supporting customers across all media versus doing off-line work
  • Which support lines are having service issues, and
  • Dashboards that instantly spot areas where performance is good or needs to be improved

5 benefits of moving your call center to the cloud

Moving your medium or large business call center to the cloud has many benefits. From significantly reducing call center costs to easy management when your business scales up or down. 8×8 Virtual Contact Center is cost effective, enterprise ready, secure and compliant.

1. 8×8 Virtual Contact Center will reduce your costs

When you move your call center to the cloud, your business reduces the cost of providing exceptional customer experiences. Compared to a traditional contact center, the upfront cost of a virtual contact center is very low. Some businesses can save up to 70% in upfront costs.

The ongoing costs of maintaining and running a traditional call center can be high. When equipment and hardware needs upgrading and proprietary on-premise platforms are outdated, the costs can balloon. A virtual contact center offers all the features and functions of a traditional call center without the cost.

2. 8×8 Virtual Contact Center is secure and compliant

8×8 Virtual Contact Center offers reliable, secure and compliant communications system with disaster recovery functions. If blackouts or other catastrophic events occur, cloud solutions provide better disaster recovery than many on-premise solutions. When your business uses cloud solutions and a disaster occurs, calls can be routed agents or facilities not affected by an outage.

8×8 Virtual Contact Center business continuity is delivered through the use of fully redundant, secure data centres that are SSAE 16 certified. Compliant with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002, 8×8 information technology is independently internally and externally audited.

3. 8×8 Virtual Contact Center has call centre CRM and workforce management integration

When your business moves to the cloud with 8×8 Virtual Contact Center your CRM easily integrates. Real-time data allows your agents to improve customer interactions and enhance your customer experience. 8×8 Virtual Contact Center integrates with leading on-demand CRM services including:

  • Salesforce.com
  • Netsuite hosted by Microsoft Dynamics, and
  • Zendesk

8×8 Quality Management for 8×8 Virtual Contact Center ensures your agents always provide the best service for all your customers. 8×8 Quality Management allows you to:

  • Highlight high-performing agents as role models
  • Identify and monitor agents who require coaching, and
  • Enable collaboration via @mentions.

4. 8×8 Virtual Contact Center allows multi-channel communication

When your business uses 8×8 Virtual Contact Center your customers can communicate with you on the channels they prefer From chat and web to phone and email, the 360-degree view of customer contacts ensures your agents enhance the customer experience.

5. 8×8 Virtual Contact Center features historical and real time reports

8×8 Virtual Contact Center reporting surpasses traditional call centre reporting with real insights into how your customers are being served across all channels. You also get industry leading metrics about your agents and contact centre performances. With easy to read graphics, 8×8 Virtual Contact Center reporting offers custom reporting that helps you:

  • Rapidly identify important trends in how you are serving your customers
  • Stay focused on the things that are impacting your customers’ experiences
  • Have accurate information about your team’s performance, no matter where they are.

How to get the best virtual contact center software and technology

When your medium or large business is looking for a cloud-based contact center solution, it’s important to focus on what’s really important: your customers. Valuable time and money can be wasted if a contact center system needs to be constantly maintained, updated and requires regular troubleshooting. And if the technology is out-dated and inefficient your business may struggle to build long-term customer relationships, customer loyalty and repeat business

8×8 Virtual Contact Center can provide your business with the advanced communication tools required to deliver world-class customer service and support. To meet the needs of any size organisation, 8×8 Virtual Contact Center offers four contact center options 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 has helped thousands of Australian businesses with virtual contact center solutions. As one of Australia’s largest privately owned telecommunications companies we seamlessly deliver future proof virtual office solutions for medium to large businesses. Find out how 8×8 Virtual Contact Center can help enhance customer experience, cut costs and increase productivity.