What is a cloud contact center?

An effective contact center can play a critical role in boosting customer satisfaction, increasing customer retention and driving revenue. While the contact center remains a central customer touchpoint, how it delivers customer service continues to adapt as technologies and customer expectations change. 
 

What is a cloud contact center?

A cloud contact center is a customer engagement model that anchors itself on an internet-based “operations center” for the management of inbound and outbound customer communications. Cloud contact center agents are not required to work in a central location and can be geographically dispersed. The employees could work from home or may be grouped in multiple offices in different locations. Cloud contact centers are sometimes referred to as virtual contact centers.

With a cloud contact center, you can leverage innovation to improve the customer experience while reducing your CX costs. Let's look at how it works and the possible cloud contact center benefits for your organization.
 

How does a cloud contact center work?

A cloud contact center uses cloud-based software to deliver the tools and insights required to power inbound and outbound customer interactions.

By empowering and delivering contact center communications through the cloud, businesses can overcome the limitations and expense of legacy, on-premises technology while expanding their ability to communicate through new channels such as email, SMS, social media and chat.

In an on-premise contact center, a business has to leverage on-premises PBX hardware and must purchase, install and maintain it. Not only does this take up valuable capital expenditure (CapEx), but it can severely limit the contact center's ability to scale or add new functionality.

With a cloud-based contact center, all your capabilities are delivered through software over a high-speed internet connection. In addition to providing all the functionality you need to manage operations, the cloud contact center software provider handles things such as maintenance, servers, cybersecurity and more.
 

What are the key cloud contact center benefits?

A cloud contact center unlocks several benefits that impact your operations and bottom line—and benefit both your customers and employees.

• Reduced CapEx: A cloud-based solution doesn't require expensive hardware, allowing you to redeploy your capital to other initiatives. Further, the provider maintains the cloud software, you can free your IT team to focus on other strategic tasks instead of having to worry about maintenance and troubleshooting.
• Improved CX: Allow customers to interact with your contact center using the channel that is most convenient to them while gaining more personalized service. You can also connect your contact center platform to your customer relationship management (CRM) platform for real-time customer insights that enable agents to respond faster and with more accuracy, while artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning leverage data from contact center interactions to improve agent training, productivity and staffing coverage.
• Agent efficiency: A cloud contact center can collect all its customer interactions in one place, no matter what channel it comes in from. This helps agents quickly access all their customer interactions in a single pane of glass instead of logging into multiple platforms. In addition, you can leverage your CRM data to ensure the customer is routed to the right agent, while integrated Voice of the Customer tools can gather customer sentiment to help you improve agent performance.
• Greater scalability, agility and flexibility: Cloud solutions offer the flexibility to quickly add more agents during busy holiday periods and then reduce the amount of service you use when call volumes return to normal.
• Increased innovation: A cloud-based contact center solution makes it simple to add automation such as chatbots, virtual assistants and interactive voice recognition.
• Decentralized workforces: In addition to giving employees access to all the tools they need to work, a cloud contact center benefits your agents and managers by enabling them to work from home. This can help you compete for workers who value remote work and allows you to source employees outside your local market, significantly increasing your talent pool.  A cloud platform's versatility can help reduce the challenges of managing remote workers.
• Greater resiliency: A cloud contact center leverages the internet to connect with customers, providing greater continuity than a single on-premises hardware system while mitigating the cost of maintaining a backup system that is rarely used. Because the contact center's data and functionality are in the cloud, operations can be transferred to another location in case of a natural disaster or power outage, ensuring customers can continue to connect.
• Greater security and reliability: A cloud contact center platform is maintained by the provider, not your IT department, ensuring that the software will deliver the uptime your operations require. It also allows you to leverage the provider's vast cybersecurity resources and expertise to help you meet the regulatory and legal compliance requirements necessary to protect consumer privacy.
• Increased self-service: A cloud-based contact center solution makes it simple to add automation to your contact center, such as AI-powered chatbots, virtual assistance and interactive voice recognition. This helps customers self-serve support quickly for things like looking up an account balance, changing a password and checking on the status of an order. Not only do customers get the information and support they need without waiting on hold, but it frees up agents to focus on the customers who have more complex issues.
   

How do you implement a cloud contact center?

Unlike a traditional contact center, moving forward with a cloud solution is simple. From an infrastructure perspective, the only thing you need is a secure, reliable, high-speed connection to the internet to implement and roll out the solution to employees.

While some companies decide to migrate completely to the cloud, others use it as a way to augment their existing legacy solution. For example, one common path to migration is to implement a cloud contact center as a business expands to new sites. This allows the company to maximize existing infrastructure investments while deploying rapidly to the new location without expanding the network or adding more on-premises equipment. Network routing makes it simple to blend interactions between legacy and cloud-based environments, ensuring that your CX does not become siloed across locations.
 

Get started with a cloud contact center

Verizon's Virtual Contact Center helps you simplify your path to an agile, efficient and cost-effective cloud-based contact center. It provides a full feature set that enables customers to contact agents using their preferred method through omnichannel routing while allowing agents to work equally effectively in the office or at home. With more than 50,000 agents across 35+ countries using Virtual Contact Center, it's a proven solution for bringing CX to the cloud.

Learn more about what a Virtual Contact Center can do for your CX operations.

The author of this content is a paid contributor for Verizon.