Cloud Contact Centers Offer a Path to a Better Customer Experience

By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor

The quality of the customer experience being offered is more important than ever today. One study found that after a bad customer experience, it takes about 12 positive customer experiences to make up for it in a customer’s eyes…that’s presuming the customer hasn’t bolted for a competitor first. It’s an oft-cited fact that it costs many times more to win a new customer than to keep an existing one. Yet so many companies are still struggling to hold onto their customers. Why is this?

Running a good contact center today means blending inbound and outbound, and combining all contact channels – from Web to mobile to telephone to social media to in-store sales efforts – into a single, cohesive picture of the customer. It means routing contacts in such a way that the most knowledgeable agent is able to take on the customer’s issue. The modern contact center has so many moving parts today, many companies can’t keep up. Management is fractured, with some responsibilities lying in the contact center, and others in departments such as marketing, with communication between the managing parties minimal or non-existent.

For companies seeking to overcome all these barriers, cloud contact centers are helping immensely. They assist companies in better blending inbound and outbound, proactive and reactive activities and multiple channels, including newer ones such as social media and mobile app. These benefits may actually assist in the uptake of cloud-based contact center solutions platforms, according to Duncan Macrae writing for TechWeekEurope.

“…Cloud-based contact centers are coming into their own and for good reason,” wrote Macrae. “They combine the proven benefits of a traditional on-premise solution with the increased flexibility, scalability and reliability of the latest contact center as a service (CCaaS) solutions. Add to this true multichannel capability in a single application and a cost-effective pay-as-you-go pricing model and it’s clear that deploying a cloud-based contact center really is the way to go when looking to put excellence into the customer experience.”

Some of the ways cloud-based contact center platforms can benefit the customer experience include the ability to seek highly qualified call center workers further afield (using remote or home agents), through better integration with customer relationship management (CRM) solutions that give agents access to more and better information, more intelligent call and contact routing that can prioritize certain contacts from certain customers, disaster recovery that allows the contact center to work from anywhere if a location is left without power from a storm, social media integration and better reporting and alerts that can let managers and supervisors know if a metric is going out of whack.

Technological limitations were once a large barrier to achieving customer excellence. Now that this is no longer an excuse, companies have only themselves to blame when they fall down on the customer experience job.