Contact Centres And Cloud Embracing The Veritable Union

The post-2020 contact centre era

India’s contact centre industry is estimated to grow at a CAGR of over 20% to $75 bn by 2026. This massive industry serves customers across continents, supporting businesses across all industries. In 2020, the contact centres were brought to a screeching halt as a result of lockdowns, and billions of dollars of investment on contact centre infrastructure was rendered unsustainable, and contact centres were struggling to extract value from them. In the meanwhile, fast-rising customer expectations placed greater expectations on customer service arms of businesses than ever before. Moreover, businesses relied on the resumption of contact centre operations for their own business continuity plans. It was in this context, that the logic of migrating the contact centre to the cloud emerged as one that has been long due and promised even greater savings and value than ever before.

Moving beyond the why

The post-2020 contact centres must not deliver seamless service to the businesses of their customers, but also empower great experiences in alignment with the customer journeys that these businesses promise to deliver to their customers. Here are four top reasons as to why cloud is the key enabler in helping contact centres fulfil these new expectations of them:

• Continuity: To find resilience in the wake of the pandemic, cloud is the key in unplugging agents from their desks and the supporting infrastructure that enables them to connect seamlessly with customers and businesses alike
• Experience delivery: Beyond service calls and resolution orchestration, contact centre agents must anticipate customers’ needs and align their interactions with what the business knows, and the next best actions to serve the customer.
• Savings and value: Cloud-hosted operations not only help contact centre businesses save on the cost of infrastructure, it also helps them deliver with higher SLAs across marketing, sales, and post-sales service, consequently enabling them to raise the value they deliver through their services.
• Agent experience: Cloud is the key in enhancing the agent experience, which in turn, solves the ageold challenge of high attrition rates for contact centre agents, in addition to enhancing the service delivered by them to their customers.

The shift to the cloud is today, a question of how and when. Contact centre businesses must understand what the cloud holds for them, and how it delivers on these promises.

Envisioning contact centres in the cloud

The move to the cloud must be seen as an opportunity that will enable contact centres to achieve the next stage of their evolution. Here are five key areas where cloud uplifts the orchestration of service delivery in the context of today’s business ecosystems:

• Agility and scalability: By untethering agents from the infrastructure, cloud-powered contact centres come with the promise of unbounded scalability. Enabling agents to connect via desktop apps, mobile apps and web applications, cloud solutions bring unmatched agility and allows agents to connect securely to the businesses’ PBX and with customers from anywhere
• Agent efficiency: Cloud solutions for contact centres enable agents to do more through seamless integrations with the CRM, click-to-call features, and as a result, the agents are synced to what the underlying business knows about the end-customer. Moreover, with features like click-to-call, real-time voicemail transcription, and next-best actions delivered to agents as they interact with the customers, cloud solutions eliminate the think time and speed the agents directly to action, significantly boosting their efficiency levels.
• Seamless service flow: In a time when customer experience is the key to differentiation, cloud brings seamlessness to the customer journey as they move from self-service to agent calls. With real-time sentiment analysis, agents can deliver service interactions with greater empathy and personalisation. Moreover, modern cloud solutions serve as integrated marketing platforms where customised campaign flows can be mated with IVR flows, and API hooks enable insight delivered directly to agents from any databases where valuable information exists. An integrated virtual enables automated, scheduled call-backs and messages along the channel of preference at the right time to the customers.
• Security: New-age cloud solutions are armed with context awareness, where agents see only what they need to. Masking of critical customer information, coupled with role-based access, enables contact centres to deliver without any slippages and leakages to their clients, thereby avoiding financial losses and reputation damage to themselves.
• Analytics and reporting: While cloud solutions simplify and enhance service orchestration, they also come with cutting-edge analytics toolsets like dashboards that indicate service level fulfilment, agent performance, and other key metrics like mean time to resolve (MTTR), first contact resolution (FCR), agent turnover, and more. With a granular and top-level view of the status of operations, cloud-powered contact centres help locate the gaps and close them without the need for extensive diagnostics and back-and-forths between multiple touchpoints.

What next?

While the logic of migrating contact centres to the cloud is a flawless one and the move, inevitable, picking the best-of-breed solutions that promise to deliver with a solid vision for the future of contact centres is a key step in getting it right. Cloud solutions for contact centres, like Smartflo by Tata Tele Business Services, are already helping contact centres operate with excellence in today’s data-driven world where the customer is of utmost priority. Time to move past the inertia and beyond the centres - onto the cloud, which contact centres must embrace without fail to stay relevant today, and tomorrow alike.