Call centers are, unfortunately, often stereotyped as places of frustration for both employees and callers. When most people picture one, they think of an office filled with cramped cubicles and irate customers taking their frustrations out on exasperated agents. Perhaps you’ve even seen a TV show or movie where the air conditioner broke down in a call center to make things even worse.

What is a Cloud Call Center?

A call center is a business function that handles inbound and/or outbound phone calls with customers. A cloud call center, or cloud-based call center, is one that has its technology for handling these calls (such as the automatic caller distributor) on servers on the internet “cloud” rather than locally-owned equipment. This can make it cheaper to start up a new company while still providing excellent customer service capabilities!

What are the benefits of being a cloud call center?

• Scalability
• At-home agents
• Flexibility

Luckily, that air conditioning scenario can be avoided in real life, thanks to services like air conditioner repair in Chicago. A work office should always be comfortable, especially now that you’re likely trying to get employees to come back after remote work caused by COVID-19. Have a skilled technician look at your air conditioning system and the furnace of your office to ensure everything is working properly. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to install a programmable thermostat as well to keep consistent temperatures and ensure that your air conditioner completes its cycles.

While you certainly can’t discount the importance of comfort, you’ll want your customer service professionals to use the best technology available for their jobs as well. Call centers have notoriously high turnover rates, and one of the most common employee complaints is using outdated technology that makes the work harder. Honestly, these days, “call center” is a bit of a misnomer. With the ability to use digital channels granted by cloud based technology, the term “contact center” makes more sense. Here’s everything you need to know about cloud based contact center solutions.

The cloud helps you overcome the limitations of legacy systems.

On-premises legacy solutions are becoming obsolete in the world of contact centers. They guarantee a solid connection between customers and agents but come with some major downsides, such as expensive repair work or upgrades from your own IT department. With on-premise systems, you’re also limited to how much customer service can be done remotely because your agent must remain at their desk in order to maintain the interaction; this is limiting for crisis management situations where remote access may be needed most urgently. This is a world of digital transformations, and we’ve all seen how important remote work can be lately.

A cloud contact center is one that operates on a network-based service, where the provider offers services based on a subscription model. Cloud services have CRM integrations that lead to better customer experiences, they have no need for on-premises hardware, and security and upgrades are handled by the provider, so contact center supervisors are freed up to focus on core tasks. Installing cloud-based systems is easy, they can be scaled as your business grows, and they allow great flexibility for employees.

True omnichannel routing is the future of contact centers.

Cloud contact centers offer greater convenience for customers since they don’t just rely on voice calls. With cloud technology, customers can contact your agents using their preferred digital means, such as text, SMS, live chat, mobile app, and more.

Calling customer service is easy when we have IVR! No need to wait on hold for hours or get transferred around before getting the help you want.

Calling customer service has never been easier thanks to interactive voice response, a technology that connects customers with agents right away and makes it hard not to find what they are looking for in minutes instead of waiting on hold all day long listening through phone menus, or being passed from agent-to-agent until someone finally answers your question.

When you work with the best cloud contact center solution, you’ll even get omnichannel routing, which allows customers to seamlessly switch between communication channels when needed, all while staying in contact with the same agent. For example, if a customer started a conversation through webchat shortly before they needed to run an errand, instead of losing their progress if the conversation takes longer than expected, they can simply switch to a hands-free voice call as they leave the house. This saves everyone’s time and provides a unique and memorable customer journey.

Don’t get left behind using old technology. Switch to cloud call center software as soon as possible to provide a great customer experience and boost your agent productivity.

How does a cloud contact center improve customer experiences while you maximize agent productivity?

With the emergence of modern call center technology, agents are empowered to provide customers with quality service. Such features as skills-based routing and predictive dialers help boost productivity while ensuring that every customer is satisfied.

Providing the right information at the right time:

The frustration and anger that customers come into a call with can be difficult for an agent to deal with. To make matters worse, when agents are forced to switch between numerous legacy backend systems, they not only slow down the process of service but also prevent themselves from being able to fully connect or empathize with their customer’s needs.

Matching an agent’s skills to the customer’s needs:

The customer’s voice is one of the most powerful weapons in your arsenal. It can reveal actionable insights that may have been lost by restricting avenues for interaction with your company to just web, mobile, chat, and email channels; but it takes a unified hub—such as those offered by cloud contact center platforms—to make sense of all this data across an enterprise.

Call center software warrants real-time support:

A whopping 38% of customers are at risk of defecting to competitors if their issues aren’t resolved on the first call. But by using a hub-and-spoke approach, cloud contact center solutions allow agents to follow the full thread of a customer’s journey from one channel to the next and service them more efficiently so that these problems can be solved in real-time—or even anticipated before they occur.

Experience faster deployment of new capabilities:

The days of waiting weeks or even months for new technologies are done. With a cloud contact center, you can add capabilities on the fly with instant results that will help your agents provide better customer service and increase sales opportunities while keeping costs low because it is so easy to deploy the technology.

What’s the difference between on-premise and cloud-based call centers?

It can be tough to pick the right call center software for your business. There are many different options available, and it’s important that you understand what they offer in order to make an informed decision. In this article we will explore two leading solutions–OneCall vs GoToAssist–and highlight their pros/cons so you can decide which one is best suited for your needs!

These are the four most common types of call center software. Let’s take a look: