words Al Woods
In the past, only bigger enterprises had the money to invest in a call center, since it had to be set up on the premises. But now even the smallest company can gain this competitive edge with a cloud-based call center. Here are a few benefits a cloud call center can offer.
Be as flexible as modern tech
Once you’ve invested in hardware and software, paid for installation, and hired the right people to keep the system up to date and secure, do you really want to do most of that again next year just because technology has developed?
Legacy tech is highly limiting, making it painful to add new channels, integrate systems, update phone menus, or otherwise respond quickly to market or technology changes. Cloud-based call centers erase all these issues.
The best call center software is endlessly flexible, and it’s built and maintained by professionals who are always on top of the latest developments. Their job is to keep up with changes and deliver a user-friendly experience to you.
Improve the experience for your customers
Nothing kills a business as quickly as poor customer service, and today’s customers are no longer willing to stay trapped in an IVR menu or wait on hold for a half hour, growing ever more angry each time the music stops and a recorded voice says, “your call is very important to us.”
If customers have a bad experience trying to communicate with you, 66 percent of them will complain to their friends and family about it. Close to 40 percent will cancel the order or service they were planning to make, and 41 percent will completely stop doing business with you.
A cloud-based call center addresses this issue by integrating your website, app, chat, social media channels, phone calls, and emails so that customers quickly reach the right agent no matter how they reach out.
Try to balance the use of technology and traditional customer service as well. You may hire a call center outsourcing provider to make sure your customers concerns are being addressed by well-trained people. Their agents use tools and equipment to monitor calls and doesn’t compromise communicating with customers in a personal way.
Scale in whatever way you wish
On-premises call centers are difficult to scale up or down. If your retail business sees a significant uptick before Christmas or your plumbing company gets a lot more calls in the summer, your on-premises center really only offers two choices. You can either ignore the issue and let callers wait longer, or pay to upgrade everything while half of it sits useless during the rest of the year.
If you need to tighten your belt, for whatever reason, scaling down your on-premises call center is also hard to do. You’ll have to let full-time employees go, decide which lines to let expire, and still pay rent and air conditioning costs to keep your valuable infrastructure safe.
Cloud-based contact centers scale easily and instantly. You don’t have to worry about exceeding capacity or hardware. All you need to do is upgrade or downgrade your pay-as-you-go contract and your call center expands or contracts as you need it to.
Learn what’s going on
One key advantage of a cloud-based call center is access to analytics that let you see details about your customers, your call center, and how well communication is happening.
With the reporting that comes with your call center software, you’ll learn who is calling and why. You’ll find out how many are responding to a specific ad campaign, or easily compile stats on issues with services or products so you can find out about problems while they’re still small.
You’ll be able to easily get data on agent performance, the average call time for various issues, the average wait time for customers at different times of day, and keep an eye on department performance. All you have to do is put that data to work improving the experience for your customers.
