This is the second of a series on omni-channel contact center communications in the cloud.
Why would you want to migrate your call center to an omni-channel contact center? Particularly, why move to an unified environment in the cloud? What is it going to give you that you can’t get from your current on-premise system? What problems is it going to solve? In this second part of our series, we’ll look into the top reasons why you should consider migrating to a unified omni-channel contact center environment in the cloud.
1. Unified Omni-channel Communications Increases Agent and Manager Productivity
As your company adopts IVR, ACD, email, chat, and social technologies one-by-one, agents can become less productive as they work in multiple environments. The benefit of a unified omni-channel contact center environment is that it creates a seamless agent user experience (UX) across channels. The number of applications on an agent’s desktop is reduced. Having easily accessible customer data across channels, agents can get a view of the customer’s journey and thereby provide better service. These systems also provide integrated collaboration – easy access to Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) that helps increase first call resolution. Agents appreciate anything that makes their job easier, so they will in turn enjoy increased job satisfaction.
Managers benefit from an omni-channel unified cloud environment because it gives them visibility across channels. This visibility allows them to manage operations and performance holistically, because they have a better understanding of the big picture. Managers also benefit by new unified tools that help them track and manage agent productivity. They can monitor agent performance across channels, allowing them to place agents where their skills are utilized most effectively
2. Visibility and Control Across Customer Communication Channels
As a call center leader, you need to create a strategy for every channel – which can be a struggle if reports and dashboards on those channels reside in disparate systems. A unified omni-channel contact center system provides you with cross-channel reports and dashboards. Real-time dashboards unify and correlate metrics from multiple channels, systems and sites. These operational and performance metrics help you make informed decisions as you manage your channels. They give you a unified view of agent qualitative and quantitative performance data, across channels, in a single unified experience.
Managing rules and scripts across disparate call center systems can be quite challenging and time-consuming. A unified omni-channel cloud contact center allows you to monitor operations from a real-time global dashboard, where you can change routing rules and scripts on the fly. You can monitor volumes and redirect traffic to different channels . You can reassign agents as necessary, based on volumes and skills. You can centralize distribution rules across sites and technology.
3. A Unified Omni-channel Contact Center in the Cloud Improves Performance
It’s difficult to service customers with customer data and interaction history stored in different on-premise systems and distributed across sites. With a unified omni-channel contact center, you don’t have to integrate data from multiple systems – you can just integrate your contact center software and your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. This provides agents with valuable customer information to better meet performance objectives, whether sales, customer retention or satisfaction.
Another performance-improving benefit of an omni-channel contact center is the ability to use your customer interaction data across channels to drive routing strategies. Some systems go so far as to use analytics to dynamically match customers with the agents best suited to meet their needs regardless of channel, improving contact center business performance and operational efficiency.
4. Deliver the Best Customer Experience with a Unified Omni-Channel Contact Center
Customers don’t want to have multiple disconnected interactions where they have to start over if they change channels. Customers want to be able to start an activity in one channel and seamlessly transition to another. When companies integrate their channels via an omni-channel unified cloud environment, it gives the customer a seamless experience. A customer conversation can start with a web chat or a text message, then move to a phone call, and all the history can be preserved across channels.
A unified contact center system will also allow you to monitor customer behavior across channels. This will allow you to make the correct strategic decisions to improve the customer experience across channels.
The resulting positive customer experiences in turn lead to better business outcomes – increased sales and upsells, better customer retention and satisfaction, and improved operational efficiency.
5. Unified Omni-Channel Contact Centers Give You Competitive Advantage
In today’s competitive environment for customer acquisition and loyalty, you need to take every opportunity technology can afford you to gain advantage. With a unified omni-channel contact center, you can get real-time data integration between different systems, centralized, global call distribution and some even do analytics-based routing using this data. The real-time data, unified communications, and CRM integration can provide you with the advantage you need in a competitive environment. In addition, your cloud call center provider will keep your system up-to-date with the latest technology, while your premise-based competitors have to wait (and pay) for their vendors to upgrade their systems.
6. A Cloud Omni-Channel Contact Center System Assures Reliability and Scalability
Customer service and retention depend on having a reliable call center system. Being in the cloud provides reliability – cloud based software is reliable. Cloud call centers continue to operate if a call center location goes offline, as agents in any location can log into the queue to answer calls. You don’t have to worry about outages or upgrades. In the event of a disaster, cloud-based call centers provide disaster recovery capabilities and redundancy that were formerly only available to large enterprises.
Scalability is another benefit of the better cloud-based contact center systems – you can easily add more channels as needed or as new technology becomes available. With some systems, you can start with 25 agents and as your business grows, scale up to thousands as needed.
All of these benefits are reasons why you should consider migrating to a unified omni-channel contact center environment in the cloud. Check back next week for the next in our series – “when” to migrate to an omni-channel unified environment.
If your company is growing rapidly, read more about why companies experiencing significant growth are moving to cloud communications across their organizations.
Many different industries are discovering the value of cloud omni-channel communications, read more about industry-specific benefits.
