How a cloud contact centre enables your business to aim higher
Published by Colt Technology Services on January 19, 2021
Contact centres play a critical role in an organisations customer engagement strategy. Despite the rapid change in agents physical location over the past year, the cloud has enabled contact centres to continue to meet customers evolving needs. It is reported that 70% of businesses have their entire contact centre technology in the cloud or are planning to partially move next year. In the past, this shift has been mainly due to cost benefits, flexibility and the reliability of a cloud contact centre. However, there are three main areas where a cloud contact centre can enable you to do more within your customer service organisation:
Enabling the full working from home environment
Due to COVID-19, contact centre agents have had to work remotely. Contact centres normally mean scripts, routing plans, and a company strategy that reflects the intelligence of their on-premises solution. However, they now have to replicate these processes in the cloud to enable their agents to work remotely. This is a process that traditionally has taken months or years, but is now being completed within weeks. There has been an entire infrastructure change, where IT teams have had to replicate the office working environment from an agent’s home office. They have achieved this through moving to a cloud contact centre, allowing their agents to continue working and serve their callers effectively. This has not just been a solution to the working restrictions enforced on organisations, but is a key element of the future workplace.
Ability to respond to a surge of calls
In recent months many organisations have received a surge of inbound calls. eCommerce companies have had to cope with exceptional demand because more consumers are shopping online. Travel agencies and airlines have dealt with massive bookings cancellations. This has put huge pressure on Customer Service teams. By moving their contact centres to the cloud, organisations have enabled their customers to contact them through new channels very easily (e.g. social media and instant messaging). A cloud contact centre also removes any bottle-necks that could minimise the number of calls they can manage, as an on-premises solution is limited in the number of channels agents are accessible through.
Digital transformation to the cloud
There is a fundamental need for the contact centre to communicate with other applications, such as CRM, Unified Communications, and billing systems, to enable agents to be fully effective in their role, no matter their location. Not integrating this into an organisation’s holistic cloud strategy creates more challenges for them. The longer the contact centre remains on-premises, the more complex it becomes for IT teams to integrate it into the cloud with their other cloud applications, as connectivity architectures and data protection challenges may arise. However, by implementing a cloud contact centre, they are able to securely store all their applications in the cloud, simplifying the management of the resilience, data protection and security of their business applications.
These areas have led organisations to invest in cloud contact centres and allowed them to cope with the new challenges they have faced over the past year to keep callers happy. Find out how Colt’s new partnership with Atos is paving the future for cloud contact centres, and take a look at Gartner’s latest report on how businesses are optimising Microsoft Teams within their cloud contact centres. Start planning how to provide your callers with the best possible experience at a time when they need it most.
Christophe Dos Santos, IN Product Manager
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