CCaaS and beyond: Transforming contact center success

It’s becoming clear for those that run a contact center that Customer Experience (CX) is what is defining brands and their reputation right now.

Those who are dealing with calls well will come out strong at the end and if you work in the call center industry, you will have seen big changes in the way business is being handled and the landscape as a whole, like:

• Increase in Call Volume – Calls from unhappy customers, fragile customers, or even outbound calls made by agents trying to do some damage control.
• Complex Calls and AI Problems – Flight and Hotel cancellations, online orders, package delays, etc – these calls are not your run-of-the-mill question and answer calls, they’re taking time to deal with. This is not something AI is built to deal with or even understand just yet.
• Agents Working From Home – People have gone from a single building and connection to a private connection in their own home. Security risks also come into this, as unsecure connections are being used to convey personal and private information.

With all this in mind, what should a contact center manager look to do in order to future proof their contact center while trying to cut costs?

Switching to CCaaS

Contact centers need to prioritize the ability to scale up and down quickly and retain the ability to deal with traffic changes without sacrificing quality and customer experience.

The logical choice, therefore, is to switch from an on-premises setup, to a cloud-based Contact Center as a Service model.

We’re noticing more and more businesses making the decision to devote enough resources to their contact center so they can move it to the cloud.

The cloud facilitates rapid and agile expansion in the voice capabilities of your CX operations – just what’s needed when a global lockdown disrupts your entire business, or a celebrity tags a product and sales shoot through the roof.

Most importantly, the cloud enables you to differentiate your business by making your CX a true competitive advantage.

What that means for your CX

Owning every touchpoint with your customers, building on the data from every interaction, and making it easy to get seamless support across devices means creating new value for your business and owning the sweet spot between customer experience and customer service.

Understanding the experience/journey each customer has gone through in this time of uncertainty of COVID-19 will be key moving forward in the future for businesses, and Cloud communications specifically can be a positive point of CX differentiation, as an efficient route to multi-market localization, and a compliant route to expansion.

What that means for your bottom line

One of the biggest benefits of cloud-based solutions has always been cost savings. Scaling your systems as and when you need to with cloud services means you save a good chunk of cash on infrastructure and resources.

Time is money, and the man-hours you can save using programmatic and automated comms can save you a boatload down the line.

Using an API gives you the ability to automate a number of functions that would otherwise require a large manual overhead including:

• Submission of the required information to regulators
• Understanding any local service restrictions on use cases around phone numbers
• Number porting
• Local access to emergency services
• Verify end user details

Annoyingly, some countries like using APIs, and some lie using CSVs, making automation inconsistent. But for the most part, once you have your APIs set up, they can help save you both time and money.