Top 5 Benefits of a Cloud-Based Contact Center

With so many aspects of businesses shifting since COVID-19, the call center, as we know it, will never be the same. As customer service and support centers become increasingly overwhelmed, enterprises are making a rapid shift to a more modern and dynamic contact center environment. 

By integrating an omnichannel approach to meet their customers’ ever-demanding and evolving needs, businesses can stay ahead of market trends. Today’s tech-savvy consumer demands a seamless, personalized, and quick customer experience across a multitude of channels, including social media, email, voice, and the internet more broadly. Enterprises need an efficient way to respond and communicate with customers that exceed expectations.

The Contact Center Amid the Digital Era

With digital channels taking over the way brands and customers communicate, cloud-based contact centers are the key to improving customer experience, satisfaction, and retention. According to DMG Consulting, 62% of organizations have already moved into a cloud-based call center, and the numbers continue to rise. With digital transformation initiatives dominating today’s business landscape, moving your call center to the cloud from an on-premise model is virtually necessary to stay competitive and increase efficiency across your entire organization.

Embracing technologies such as Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI (CCAI) enables organizations to deliver top-notch customer service and increase operational efficiency. Virtual agents can converse naturally with customers and assist human agents on gathering pertinent details to solve the more complex problems that come through the call center.

An important factor to consider when moving your contact center to the cloud is partnering with a company rooted in the cloud to support your move. Here at Maven Wave, our expert team works with your business to design an end-to-end solution driven by data and insights. By helping you define your targets, we can build a collaborative roadmap and bridge the gaps between IT and your call center team.

From fast deployment and implementation to real-time insights and everything in between, let’s take a closer look at the Top 5 Benefits of a Cloud-Based Contact Center. 

1. Rapid Deployment, Implementation, and Innovation

With the growing strain on call centers, a cloud-based solution provides a rapid resolution to increasing efficiency while delivering a robust end-to-end solution, which can be customized to meet the specific needs of your organization. That could include supporting live agents, routing calls, or reducing call center volume by serving customers via voice or chatbots. After deciding which solution is best for your environment, your cloud call center can be launched in weeks as opposed to months—facilitating conversations across digital channels with customers sooner. 

When enlisting a trusted consultant to enable this transition, your businesses can get things off the ground even faster and gain the expert assistance and service needed to boost adoption and success. Moreover, with specialists that can custom tailor your solution, the possibilities are endless.  

CCAI offers the opportunity to build and deploy a custom virtual agent rapidly. These virtual agents enable you to offer 24/7 support via voice and chat channels, providing your customers with immediate conversational self-service options. What’s more, Google Cloud made significant enhancements to its CCAI platform to launch more intuitive conversations with Dialogflow. Designed to support complex (multi-turn) conversations, Dialogflow is truly omnichannel and ideal for companies with large contact centers.

CCAI integrates into existing call center technology to enable cloud capabilities. It also works across digital channels to provide insights on all your contact center data to improve your customer interactions, creating a delightful customer experience. From automating interactions and transactions across platforms to creating chat and voice bots in over 20 languages, Maven Wave can deploy this state-of-the-art technology in a matter of weeks. For more details, check out this brief video below. 

2. Security and Reliability

Security is always a significant priority when it comes to your business; customers trust that you are keeping their data safe across all channels. Most cloud solutions leverage very highly available data centers to store data. Furthermore, vital enterprise-level redundancy and failover procedures are in place.

When vetting cloud contact center solutions, you’ll want to take a closer look at their security model. Google Cloud’s world-scale infrastructure provides your businesses with a unique capability to innovate while helping to keep your organization secure and compliant. Not only does Google Cloud improve operational efficiency, but it also integrates the highest level of security across this solution. 

Customer service being down for even a minute is unacceptable and costly, to say the least. Indirect and direct losses negatively impact a business. From operational expenses to loss of revenue and customer recovery expenses, your business can’t afford interruption. 

3. Improved Customer Experience

The level of customer support you deliver can make or break your business. Providing a delightful experience across multiple channels is the foundation and value proposition of a cloud contact center. Customers who engage and have a positive experience when communicating with your brand become advocates for your brand, translating into increased customer retention, revenue, and loyalty. 

By implementing a contact center in the cloud, customers can seamlessly interact with your brand in a multi-channel fashion by leveraging voice and chat bots within the CCAI solution to receive timely resolutions to their issues. When integrating modern and dynamic technologies, such as Google Cloud Dialogflow and CCAI into your customer experience, businesses can further enhance the customer journey by delivering a more personalized and tailored interaction. 

Powered by Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Google Cloud Speech-to-Text, and other ML technologies, offer a virtualized, cost-effective, yet still exceptional customer personalization level and experience. Incorporating this technology can also help decipher user sentiment to determine when unsatisfied callers should be transferred to a live agent. For more details, check out this brief video below. 

4. Greater ROI

At a time when enterprises across the globe face even greater pressure to deliver fast, efficient services with reduced resources, utilizing call center software that reduces costs without sacrificing the customer experience is the most crucial step in your call center transformation. 

Significant ROI can be found by determining which transactions are more complex than can be handled by an automated IVR system, but aren’t so complex that they require assistance from a human agent. Many of these “middle ground” customer interactions can be efficiently and cost-effectively handled by AI-powered, intuitive virtual agents. The ROI comes from shifting those interactions away from human agents – and consequently freeing them up for the interactions that are best served by live customer service agents. The optimized integration of IVR technology for basic interactions, AI virtual agents for more complex interactions, and human agents for exceptions and the most complex interactions can create efficiencies that drive an ROI from a call center transformation.

5. Scalability and Flexibility

As your business grows and evolves, your cloud-based contact center does too. With on-premise solutions, this process can be tedious and time-consuming. 

During your peak season, crisis, or other events involving an influx of inbound calls, you can easily add seats to your call center. In some instances, this can be done remotely through a portal. Need to scale down? A cloud-backed call center provides you with the flexibility to do so. At the same time, a cloud call center allows you to support a remote workforce, critical in today’s changing world. Staff can work from any location or any device, so customers are never left without answers. 

From integrating AI and ML into your contact center transformation to delivering exceptional customer service while increasing operational efficiency and ROI, cloud-based contact center solutions are living up to the hype. 

Utilizing cloud-based technology, it is relatively simple to get started with an initial virtual agent – something to help provide some much-needed relief to over-taxed call center agents. From there, there are ways to expand those capabilities to include account authentication and back-end system integrations that give those virtual agents more power to address a broader set of customer requests. Those same virtual agents can also be expanded to additional channels – voice, chat, social, smart speaker, etc. to provide a truly integrated customer-facing experience. AI-powered, Cloud-based call center technology like Dialogflow and CCAI can help.

For more information on how Maven Wave can guide you through an end-to-end contact center transformation, contact us to connect with our experts.