The contact center industry has gone through major shifts in recent years, building upon innovations that all accomplish a similar goal – the overarching mission to improve customer interactions.
While there is plenty of evidence showing the contact center’s shift towards omnichannel support and communication, the rise of self-service portals and social media support channels, one trend stands out and that is the move towards cloud-based contact centers.
According to DMG Consulting, more than 62% of organizations have their contact center in the cloud, and 42% of the companies that don’t are considering moving to the cloud soon. So what has inspired this concerted move to the cloud? Here are seven reasons businesses are moving their contact centers to the cloud:
1. Quicker deployment and implementation
On-premise contact centers can take months to deploy while cloud-based contact centers can take as little as a couple days to a week to deploy. Cloud-based contact center solutions often offer different implementation packages depending on the complexity of the task, allowing for businesses to kick off much more quickly than with an on-premise contact center.
2. Greater security
While there has been a general concern around the security of information in the cloud, including social security numbers, credit card information, and so on, on-premise contact centers aren’t any safer. Cloud-based contact center providers have invested a significant amount of resources to improving their security systems, often times with elaborate security protocols and best practices that on-premise contact centers may lack.
3. More flexible and scalable
As your business grows, you want your solutions to grow with you. It’s much easier to add agent licenses to your contact center in the cloud than on-premise. It can be so effortless, in fact, that adding and removing agents can literally take minutes, making it the perfect solution for businesses with seasonal highs and lows.
4. Easier to manage remote agents
Probably the most obvious benefit, having a cloud-based contact center solution allows you to hire and manage remote agents from anywhere in the globe, so long as they have a good internet connect. The same cannot be said for on-premise solutions.
5. Standardizes global service
Similar to benefit #4, cloud-based contact centers help organizations with an international presence offer a more standardized service across the globe. Businesses with contact centers in the cloud can boost the quality of their customer service by offering 24/7 support and in multiple languages.
6. Upgrades and innovations are effortless
Gone are the days where you had to use a floppy disk or CD to upgrade your software. Cloud-based solutions offer their customers software updates in real-time that can installed easily with the click of a button. The nature of any SaaS business is to constantly innovate and improve their products as well as provide new features, which is an added bonus for any cloud-based contact center customer who can benefit from innovations the instant they are available.
7. Greater visibility into real-time data
With a virtual contact center, managers can monitor their remote agents in real-time, making it easier to ensure customers are receiving the highest quality service. Many cloud-based contact center features even permit managers to monitor and record agent conversations in real-time.
While exploring the benefits of moving your contact center to the cloud, I came across a lot of interesting data points highlighting both this trend over the years as well as the reported benefits businesses have already seen in their metrics. Here’s the infographic we put together at Talkdesk with the interesting data found:
Source: Talkdesk
