Top 5 reasons your Contact Centre & Customer Experience Technology Should be in the Cloud

Time and again, innovation and agility are proving to be key business success factors...

Some of the great brands have fallen victim to placing their historical success into their future business plans with a disregard for disruption and innovation. Kodak, Blockbuster, and Nokia are just a few of the global giants to feel the full force of standing still when the world was innovating around them.

So, How does this apply to your business? Well, the same can be said for companies lagging in their adoption of the new,   cloud technology on the market, purely out of fear of change.

Here are some of the significant reasons you might want to consider a move to the cloud and take advantage of the groundbreaking technology that is now readily available.

1.       You can’t afford not to:

If the last 2 years have taught us anything, it’s that the technology our businesses rely on needs to adaptto the environment, and whilst on premise solutions can be modified in certain ways, it’s not how they are designed to function. This approach can often double your costs and leave you in an awkward situation when failing to support the needs of an agile business.

In the cloud native world, the ability to work from anywhere is standard. A laptop, headset and average internet connection will get you logged in and communicating internally or with customers BAU.   As an additional benefit, there is no need to manage on site hardware, and your telco and contact centre technology don’t need to be from two separate vendors. Platforms such as AWS and Twilio not only bring a world of CX capability, they behave as the underlying Telco provider with some amazing resiliency achieved by leveraging a collection of Tier 1 telco providers.

2.       Consumption over fixed license means you only pay for what you use:

We all know what planned and unplanned absenteeism looks like in the contact centre, not to mention seasonal call volume peaks and troughs causing staff numbers to fluctuate. So why are you paying a fixed price for your licenses when they aren’t being used? Even worse, why are you paying for the maximum number of licenses you may need at any one given time, when you only use 70% of them on average? Moving to the cloud can give you access to consumption-based pricing which can provide significant savings against a traditional fixed license model. You want to switch on 5 agents today, then another 30 tomorrow, be my guest. Need to scale from 100 inbound calls a day to 1000, no worries, no more ISDN lines or extra trunks needed.

3.       Have new hires confident and on the phone in a fraction of the time:

Being a contact centre agent is difficult at the best of times, not only is there the pressure of your internal targets, but customers also have an expectation of you that can sometimes be unrealistic. Cloud native contact centre technology is designed to be moulded to the needs of the business and its employees. With tools like AWS Lambda, we can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service which means we can integrate with historically difficult legacy platforms, giving your agents everything they need to complete their tasks at their fingertips. This can result in less training on other platforms and a much faster speed to competency, not to mention lower stress levels and a better employee and customer experience.

4.       Attract the best talent:

Are you going to be the organisation that tries to stick with a “come to the office” culture? Need I mention Kodak again? It has never been harder to recruit great talent, and to have a fighting chance you need to be offering a work culture that is up there with the best. Cloud technology not only allows you to work from anywhere at any time, but your contact centre platform provides your managers and leaders with the tools and visibility they need to ensure they can still run a tight ship and support their staff.

5.       Empower your customers to self-serve, and provide your agents with better information

The leading cloud platforms are often referred to as a “builders dream” vs your traditional off the shelf technology that forces the needs of your business to mould to its capability. In the great words of Larry Wall, “Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible”. There is no longer a reason for your customers to have to wait in long queues to have simple low touch tasks performed. Similarly, we should be using the time customers spend in the IVR to gain valuable information that will help inform the agent as to the nature of the call and be able to take proactive action. Amongst many of the positive findings in Forrester’s “The Total Economic Impact Of Amazon Connect” report, their analysis of six current Amazon customers found that Amazon Connect reduced contact centre costs, deflected and streamlined calls, improved visibility, simplified management, and boosted customer experience (CX) — while providing dependability and agility at scale.

The global pandemic forced a worldwide work from home experiment which has fast become the new normal. Couple that with the ever-growing need for round the clock customer service capability and immediate customer satisfaction, and the question you should be asking yourself is:

Am I using the best technology available to me, to drive the best outcomes for my employees AND my customers?

If the answer is no, then the next question should be:  Why?

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