5 Cloud Contact Center Solutions for All

When you want to build strong relationships with your customers, you need powerful cloud contact center solutions. Effective contact centers help you deliver the best customer support, which is vital to making your business a success.

Case in point, surveys find that customer experience is a top priority for businesses over the next five years, even above product and pricing. The reason is that 86% of buyers report being willing to pay more for a great customer experience.

Surely, you want to stay competitive in such a marketplace. Therefore, learn which cloud contact center products you need, no matter which industry you’re in.

Key Takeaways:

• Cloud contact centers should have user-friendly admin portals with AI-enabled enhancements, including employee reports and advanced analytics.
• Top cloud contact center resources also include 99.999% uptime and integrate with unified communications as a service.
• Your IVR should be easy to set up and modify.

The Top 5 Cloud Contact Center Solutions

The following features are essential for any company looking for the best contact center services in the cloud.

1. Executive Portal With Reports and Analytics

One of the top benefits of cloud-based contact centers is your ability to run remote teams. However, you also need to be able to manage each agent effectively, regardless of location.

Consequently, your contact center requires straightforward admin portals for supervisors and managers. A comprehensive dashboard allows you to step in quickly when an agent requires assistance. With monitoring and whispering functions, a trainer can coach an agent through a call or even jump in without overly complex call transfers.

Your dashboard also provides reports about the activity on your system. This gives a clear view of call volumes for better agent scheduling.

Beyond seeing call volumes and workflows, in-depth analytics can give you insights into how well your agents are performing. For example, you should understand your first-contact resolution rates. That’s the number of customer queries you resolve the first time they reach out to you. 

Furthermore, artificial intelligence enables cloud contact center solutions to share even deeper insights. AI can now transcribe and discern the sentiment of conversations to determine if an interaction is positive, neutral, or negative. With these features, you can evaluate, reward, and improve your team’s performance for the ultimate customer experience.

2. Guaranteed High Uptime

You can lose revenue each time your contact center is down, so those moments should be few and far between. Therefore, a critical feature is 99.999% guaranteed uptime. Why are those five 9s so important?

That percentage equates to less than 26 seconds of downtime each month. Your customers will not be waiting hours or days for you to get back to them to resolve their issues. 

A top provider backs that guarantee with more than words. The vendor should be willing to put their money where their mouth is and reimburse you if it can’t deliver peak service.

3. Unified Communications With UCaaS

How easy will it be for you and your team to move between your contact center and your internal business line? While it might seem that any company that does one can offer the other, that’s not always the case.

Some companies that provide cloud contact center solutions centers do not offer private branch exchanges and vice versa. Other companies offer unified communications as a service but have to partner with a different vendor for their contact center as a service software. How can that become an issue?

For one, since the two systems come from different companies and designers, they may not integrate seamlessly, causing bottlenecks in your workflow. Furthermore, if the partnership dissolves, you may have a problem with your contact center or business line.

The best communications vendors have truly unified communications with integrated UCaaS and CCaaS. Fortunately, Intermedia is such a provider with a strong system that will not let you down.

4. Easy IVR

Customers now expect quick responses and self-service when possible. Cloud contact center solutions provide this capability through interactive voice response software.

This system allows your callers to hear a menu of options and input or speak a response. Even better, AI-powered natural language processing is able to interpret various responses from callers to do more than just accept a limited number of commands.

For example, instead of inputting a series of digits to change an appointment, a caller can simply say something like, “I would like to reschedule my appointment.” The person can even say the date and provide other details that the system logs.

Such systems often require adjustments. For instance, a common feature of your menu may be to mention your business hours, but these probably change around the holidays. Or you may need to set rules for menu options depending on who calls and when.

Instead of calling a technician to modify your IVR, your cloud contact center solutions dashboard should have an IVR platform that is easy to adjust. In fact, Intermedia’s appropriately named “Easy-IVR” allows you to set up and modify an IVR in less time than it takes you to eat your lunch.

5. Secure AI Assistant

AI has become the new way to work for many companies. These systems are able to retrieve information, perform complex calculations, summarize data, and even do basic coding.

Your cloud contact center solutions should also have an AI assistant to maximize your productivity. However, many models train themselves on the data you input, creating a genuine security risk.

Determine that your AI solution puts your privacy first and does not store your interactions anywhere else. Intermedia’s SPARK AI is a secure AI assistant you can trust that conforms to regulatory compliance and top-tier security standards.

Take Your Cloud Contact Center Solutions to the Next Level With Intermedia

Let Intermedia help you access the latest and greatest cloud contact center solutions. We’re a world-class communications provider that enables you to work whenever and wherever to deliver the ultimate customer experience.

Rob Oscanyan

Robert Oscanyan is a Senior Director of Product Marketing at Intermedia, where he focuses on helping businesses improve their customer experience using Intermedia's award-winning cloud communications solutions. Rob has over a decade of experience spanning market research, messaging, and elevating the voice of the customer. In his free time, he constantly creating new adventures with his wife, seven kids, and a small army of pets.