Cloud Contact Centers: Favorite Features

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Last week, we talked about why moving to a cloud contact center is so compelling. Today, let’s talk through the various features that are available in the cloud versus what you might typically get on-premise.  

Customer Experience

When it comes to contact centers today, your customers no longer want to interact with you strictly by phone. They are digital first.

Customers want to engage your agents using chat in real-time, often directly from your website. They want to use email. Or they want to just text from their mobile phone.  

Your job is to make it as simple as possible for your customers to reach your business in whatever method makes the most sense to them. And in today’s world, there are many options.  

Most of these features are available with traditional on-premise contact center solutions, but they require additional licensing and special configuration. 

With a cloud solution, these features can be enabled with a click. 

Virtual agents are now the norm and can be offered 24/7 to your customers along with other self-service options. They can gather the initial client request using AI and transfer to a human agent if needed.   

Call Recording

Call recording is a feature that most clients want but can’t always afford. It requires more server hardware, more licensing, and more storage.  

The cloud has none of these requirements and call recording can be spun up as needed.  Not to mention you get easy to use tools for searching and managing these recordings.  

High Availability

Another feature that’s often desired but not always affordable is high availability. 

Naturally, your contact center needs to stay online and available.  The hard part is that for on-premise solutions, you often have to keep the pair of servers in the same data center in order to meet database replication requirements.  

And, it makes it more difficult to have remote agents accessing the contact center inside your data center. 

If the data center becomes unreachable for any reason, or unreachable from certain sites, or if the call path is from a remote site that becomes unreachable, it causes a lot of problems and reduces the capacity of the contact center.  

With a cloud contact center, you don’t have these problems. You can have geographic redundancy across data centers and use an interface that just needs internet access – no VPN or phone hardware required. Just a headset and a computer and you’re good to go, on site or at home.  

Customer Experience Surveys

Customer experience surveys can be offered at the end of interactions and provide agents immediate visibility into how they can improve the experience for future customers.  

Easy Call Flow Management

One of the key components of an on-premise call center that is often difficult to deal with is the management of the scripts and call flow. This often requires dedicated resources that have specific app development experience.  

With the cloud, that is no longer the case.  The tools used to implement and manage call flow are much easier to work with and allow the business user to do the development instead of an IT engineer.   

There are many other features that are more readily available in the cloud. We recommend taking a close look at Webex Cloud Contact Center for your contact center needs. You can learn more here.