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If your calling environment includes a contact center, it’s time to consider moving it to the cloud. There are so many benefits that it’s nearly impossible to find a reason to not make the move.

1. Get access to advanced features at a fraction of the cost

With on-premise contact center solutions, more features equals more servers, storage, and virtual machines. If you have fewer than 50 agents, the infrastructure requirement can be very expensive. But with a cloud-based contact center, you get access to all of the advanced features—things like call recording, call analytics, high availability, email and chat interactions, and advanced reporting and dashboards—without all of the equipment.

This digital-first support means customers are free to reach out through whichever platform suits their lifestyle. In the past the only option was a simple phone call, but that doesn’t give customers anywhere near the flexibility that they expect. So Cisco has moved to an Omnichannel approach, giving customers options:

• If they'd like to leave a message, your agents can call back.

• If they'd like to text you, they can.

• If they'd like to go to your website, they can chat with an agent there.

By giving customers flexibility, you can get them out of the queue and into the hands of one of your agents faster.

Analytics are then gathered across all of these channels. With this data, you can start to identify problems and patterns across all of your channels that you might never have seen before.

This gives your agents the chance to be efficient in how they deal with calls. By using these tools your agents spend less time trying to find information and are presented with information instead. In a future post we will take a deeper dive into how these analytics can streamline your contact center.

2. Allow your agents to take calls from anywhere

Whether the world was ready for it or not, the pandemic required many businesses to allow employees to work from home. Suddenly there was this need for everyone to work remotely. This has been a crucial element in both keeping people safe and continuing to serve customers, and looking forward it seems clear that remote work is here to stay. According to a Gallup Poll, 91% of workers in the U.S. working at least some of their hours remotely are hoping their ability to work at home persists after the pandemic.

With an on-premise contact center, working remote can be difficult. This is because an on-premise solution tends to do just what it sounds like—keep things on-premise. For the most part this includes your employees as well, and admittedly this was never a problem before. These days, given the desire for remote work and because call volume can fluctuate, a cloud-based contact center ends up being the more future proof option. With a cloud-based contact center, your agents can move offsite in an instant. All they need is a computer with a web browser and they can log in and begin taking calls. It’s super easy—no VPN required, no hardware or physical phone. This allows your agents the freedom to work from anywhere.

3. Quickly scale volume if you experience a surge in call traffic

Many businesses have experienced sudden increases in call volume over the last year, creating longer hold times and, in many cases, busy signals as the inbound trunk fills up and can no longer take calls.

We’ve all been on hold before, and regardless of the reason it can be exhausting. By the time you navigate through the menu system, and are informed that it will be a 60 minute hold time, things can get irritating. Especially if this is your second or third call to handle something you feel is a simple 30 second question. You have better things to do than to wait on the line, so think about it: If you wouldn’t want to deal with it, why would your customers.

According to Salesforce, 84% of loyal customers stay because customer service is just as important as the actual product or service they’re paying for. Considering the average person spends about 43 days on hold with automated customer service in their lifetime, most people have a low tolerance for this sort of thing being slow.

Doing whatever you can to improve the customer experience is a win. They may not notice it when you fix it, but they will sure notice if you don’t.

Moving to a cloud-based platform lets you quickly add more call paths to increase the number of calls that can be received. With that comes the need to increase the number of available agents as well, and a cloud solution lets you quickly add people to your organization, even if just on a temporary basis. Typical on-premise contact centers take a couple of months to deploy because of their complexity. But you can spin up WebEx Cloud Contact Center in as little as 5 days.

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