Why Cloud Call Centres are Going to be Better for Customers

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Cloud Call Centres

It can sometimes seem like everything is being moved to the cloud. From online banking to corporate data management, from Google Docs to your email account, cloud computing is definitely sending out seismic shockwaves through the business and consumer spheres.

If you are a fully paid up believer of the near fanatic levels of hysteria that have been rumbling around the business and tech circles in the last couple of years, you are probably of the opinion that cloud networking is going to turn everything it touches into gold.

The jury is still out on a lot of the more planet rumbling claims made by the full-time subscribers to the cloud computing club, but there is no doubting that we are living in exciting times.

One area that cloud computing is definitely having a number of positive effects is the area of customer service. In particular the technology is being used to create huge efficiency gains and improve the experience of customers when it comes to call centres.

Cloud call centres are beginning to spread around the world and this is a fact that should be celebrated by consumers everywhere.

But just what benefits are customers going to start feeling from the introduction of cloud call centres?

Bringing the Call Centre into the Multi-Channel Era

The cloud call centre packages offered by companies like NewVoiceMedia are all focused around the idea of using cloud networking and data storage to drag the call centre in to the multi-channel future.

The ways that customers are beginning to interact with the companies and brand that they buy products from is changing in a number of ways, but one of the most prominent is the multiple channels that have been opened by the onset of multiple devices.

It was no more than a decade and half ago that if you wanted to get in touch with a company you would have to either send them a strongly worded letter or by physically getting someone on the phone. Today the range of ways in which a company can be contacted (or a channel) by a customer has multiplied to include email, forums, SMS messaging, instant messaging, social media and tutorial videos.

Cloud call centres allow a company to bring together all of the multiple strands of the ways they interact with their customers. By allowing agents to blend together email, web-chat and phone conservations while talking to the same customers, the cloud computing platform will allow people to get to the bottom of what they need and have a much fuller, more beneficial interaction.

Making the Call-Centre Staff Happier

Perhaps the secret ingredient to truly elevating the humble call centre into the ultimate paradigm of customer service is removing as many of the stressful aspects of actually being employed to work there. It is not strictly quantifiable in terms of efficiency gains or the direct translation into increased profitability, but it seems intuitively correct that happy members of staff will lead to happier customers.

The target driven and traffic heavy nature of a lot of call centre workers means that there is often an incentive for agents to try and make each customer interaction as quick or as profitable as possible. This can often directly affect the tone and the nature of the interaction they are having with customers.

Cloud call centres are designed to improve collaboration between sales and marketing and customer service teams and allow customers to be funnelled through to the right agents straight away. The day of customers getting lost and annoyed within the system are going to disappear. Also, by creating a central hub for multiple channels the cloud system allows agents to no longer have to toggle between a numbers of disparate computer systems, making their job a lot less annoying.

On another level, cloud computing allows an organisation to save significant amounts of their capital on hardware costs, which can subsequently be ploughed back into creating a better customer service process.

All of this is going to hopefully to make employees less stressed and pressured, which will translate into a much better customer service for everyone involved.

Making the Customers Happier

Both of the above sections have highlighted numerous ways in which cloud call centres are going to benefit the average customer, from having multiple ways to communicate with your agent at once in real time, being preselected to go to chosen agents as you are waiting and your agent having more time and scope to get the bottom of the issue right away.

When the flexibility and inherent scalability of cloud computing and the idea of not being made path dependent by your need to buy and maintain hardware infrastructures is mixed with the larger potential for data storage and analysis, means that any customer service system is automatically going to begin to become far more responsive to the needs of customers.

By placing all of this information into one system that allows an agent to see all of the information they need to know about you on one place means that the process of dealing with customers should involve more proactive problem solving and less running through scripts and attempting gather the essential information on the fly.

All in all, the average customer should start seeing the benefits of the increasingly widespread adoption of cloud call centres in the near future.

Happier customers interacting with happier employees and using a much easier system is going to equate to a better system of customer service and a more profitable and respected company.

Do you guys think that I am just being optimistic here, or am I right about the ways in which cloud call centres are going to improve the customer service process?

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James Duval
James Duval is a marketing expert who has been cited by Mainstreet, ProBloggingSuccess and MarketingProfs. He works for Comm100, thinking about new tricks and techniques in the email and marketing industries.

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