Your Contact Center Should Be Cloud-Based

The question of migrating to the cloud for communication applications is no longer one with much doubt. With hybrid workforces becoming the norm and the desire to integrate communication tools, a cloud-based contact center just makes good business sense.

If you’re still considering it or are ready to transform your contact center’s operations, here are some things to know about converting to the cloud.

The Cloud Delivers Substantial Cost Savings

The expenses of your IT operations may seem like they’re only increasing. While there’s been a significant rise in investment, there are still ways to reduce costs. Using the cloud for your contact center is one.

First, you will no longer have hardware items on your budget. Servers and the additional hardware associated with them are expensive to acquire and maintain. Equipment failures are common and must always be part of an on-premises budget.

According to data, 17 percent of contact center costs are related to IT maintenance and salaries. That data point brings up the next cost category. You don’t need full-time IT staff dedicated to these applications.

Your provider manages it, and your IT team only has to be an administrator. As a result, you won’t incur costs for most people or hours.

Third in the cost savings conversation is that you’ll pay a monthly fee to a provider for the software, with no surprises. It’s a fraction of what it would cost to your own platform.

Cloud-Based Contact Centers Deliver Easy Scalability

With the cloud, you can scale up or down, depending on fluctuations in customer service ticket volume. It’s simple to add or remove users no matter where they are working. It’s a seamless, quick activity with the cloud — not so much for the alternative.

This function would be impossible with an on-premises solution. Rather, it would require more hardware and agents to be in one physical space. Growth would always mean more cost, time, and effort.

Flexibility Is the Norm with the Cloud

With the shift in where the world works, flexibility with applications became critical. The cloud is the only way to achieve this. The application would be accessible to your staff via a desktop and mobile app. They can work from wherever and still have the same experience.

It enables companies to reach outside their metro area’s talent pool. The role will also be more attractive with the option to work remotely. That’s important to today’s labor force. It’s an expectation now and can lead to contact center employee retention and satisfaction.

Cloud-based contact center platforms empower your staff to be productive and efficient. The software also connects all workers with supervisors without being in the same space. Supervisors have access to real-time queue performance, features to manage those queues, the ability to observe interactions, and more contact center analytics.

The Cloud Improves Business Continuity

Every company should be ready for a disaster and what that would mean to their technology. With an on-premises contact center, a failure in equipment, natural disaster, or cyber incident could mute business. Downtime is a likely consequence that costs you real money and can result in reputational harm.

The cloud works differently. If your provider has industry-leading uptime reliability and built-in redundancy, you’ll still be able to use your contact center software. For any user that has power and an internet connection, they won’t lose the connection. Having this up could be pivotal in responding to an outage, as your customers will be contacting you for updates and information.

Cloud Deployment Is Fast

With the cloud, you aren’t creating that internal environment, so setup and launch move quickly. Your provider already has the infrastructure in place. You’ll go through an onboarding process and training and then be ready to roll out the technology.

On-premises are just the opposite. It could take months to get it going, and the path may be bumpy and challenging.

Cloud-Based Contact Centers Can Integrate with Unified Communications Platforms

Another reason the cloud is so crucial for contact centers is the ability to integrate it with a unified communications (UC) platform. If they are connected, you empower your employees to collaborate and communicate more easily. You’ll have all the best contact center features as well as chat, video conferencing, and file storage and sharing.

Having these tools all together allows agents to be more productive. They don’t have to hop back and forth between systems to ask questions on chat or look up a file with crucial information to solve the customer query.

Cloud Contact Center Has More Features

Moving to the cloud is a better user experience and often comes with more features than standard software. Some of the most essential include:

• Routing with customizable call flows so that the customer ends up with the agent best suited to help them.
• Aggregation of all channels for customer service (voice, chat, and email), which improves response time.
• Analytics that lead to insights are a few clicks away and can optimize how you staff, respond, and more.

It’s Time to Embrace the Cloud for Your Contact Center

Modernize and improve your contact center’s operations with the cloud. You’ll reduce costs, be able to scale, offer flexibility, ensure reliability, and improve on features.

Now, it’s time to consider the options. Check our guide to choosing the best contact center software to learn more.

The Intermedia Team

Intermedia helps businesses of all sizes connect better – through voice, video conferencing, chat, contact center, business email and productivity, file sharing and backup, security, archiving, and more – from wherever, whenever. And, as a partner-first company, Intermedia goes to work for our channel partners to help them grow their revenue and maximize their success.