What You Lose by Delaying the Use of cloud Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS).
What You Lose by Delaying the Use of cloud Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS).
discover | Thursday - 07 / 11 / 2024 - 11:42 am
One thing makes the difference between being a market leader and being late to the market. That thing is: providing an excellent customer experience.
Think about it: there’s something that leading companies in technology like Apple, in hospitality like Four Seasons, and in furniture like IKEA all share. This commonality is their ability to deliver an outstanding customer experience. Today, customers are loyal to these companies for this very reason.
If your organization’s customer experience isn’t at this level, don’t worry. In fact, many organizations provide a customer experience that is considered suboptimal. We are here today to change that.
Introducing our superhero: Cloud Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS):
Cloud solutions have been around for a while, but the need for them has become more urgent, especially after the pandemic.
Cloud solutions have not only saved hundreds of businesses but have also made people aware of how cost-effective they are compared to traditional business solutions. There’s no maintenance cost, no need for advanced hardware, and anyone can work seamlessly from anywhere.
What is a Cloud Contact Center? Imagine a massive room filled with endless rows of desks. Inside these desks are helpful people wearing headsets, filling the entire room with the chatter and noise of customer support conversations. Cloud-based contact centers are the complete opposite of that.
A more formal definition, according to Genesys, is that a cloud contact center is: “A centralized point in the organization, hosted on an internet server, through which all incoming and outgoing customer communications are handled. Cloud contact centers make interactions via voice, email, social media, and web available from almost anywhere.”
Cloud-based contact centers replace the buildings and equipment of traditional contact centers. The helpful people are still there, but they’re not all in the same place. However, we can’t describe a cloud contact center or CCaaS as simply a cloud-based system where all calls are managed through global servers. It’s much deeper than that.
Let’s examine the traditional call center solutions available today:
– Multi-tenancy solutions: These offer highly competitive pricing due to economies of scale.
– Multi-instance solutions: These protect the user from the risks of shared infrastructure, preventing data mixing and simplifying maintenance. Upgrades and troubleshooting are much easier because they are done on an individual basis.
This is about its advantages, but what about its fatal flaw? Typically, both of the previous systems require dedicated storage spaces that necessitate powerful hardware (not to mention the need for regular maintenance, which in turn leads to inflated investment costs). In contrast, all these problems disappear when using a contact center as a cloud service; customers use the latest version without any upgrade costs!… Imagine eating everything you crave and your cholesterol never rises (we would all sign up for that deal without hesitation!). Similarly, here you get all the benefits of using a contact center as a cloud service, but at a lower cost. This meets the first criterion for turning a contact center into a profitable center; by making it cost-effective.
The advantages of cloud-based contact centers don’t end there! The customer support landscape is becoming increasingly experience-driven. Customers, especially Gen Z and Millennials, demand premium treatment and a guarantee of their rights. This younger generation, constantly connected to their mobile devices, expects immediate responses, personalized suggestions, and above all, data security. If you don’t keep up with your audience, someone else will certainly take your market share, right?
What drove everyone towards cloud solutions? If we learned anything from the pandemic years, it’s the frightening unpredictability of change. Only the most adaptable individuals and businesses will survive. The culture of work has changed, and the use of various cloud solutions and artificial intelligence is now inevitable.
Let’s list the lessons we’ve learned:
– Flexible work tools are taking over. Remote work is now a must-have, and teams need tools that enable them to work from anywhere. Cloud Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions, like those offered by CBS, allow employees to connect via web browsers or smartphone and tablet apps.
– Self-service automated portals will become a customer favorite (with the option to escalate to a support agent if needed).
– The need for data-driven activities is growing every day. Companies that fail to adapt will lose customers due to poor customer experience (CX).
– Digital channels like WhatsApp and Telegram will become increasingly important. Companies must re-evaluate their customer journey maps and incorporate new factors.
– Finally, cloud solutions will shape the future of contact centers. If your business is unique and requires local customer support, you should adopt hybrid solutions (there’s no other way here).
Did you know that cloud solutions are multi-talented? Not all call centers have similar requirements, and strangely, the same package is sold to all of them, which may not be effective for many companies (especially small ones). On the other hand, companies that adopt cloud solutions have complete autonomy regarding the model that suits their needs. For example, CBS Cloud Business Solutions offers a “pay-as-you-grow” model, allowing buyers to increase or decrease their package size without worrying about long-term commitments. The second reason the cloud is multi-talented is its independence from connectivity. In other words, your clients can log in using any device as long as they have internet access: they can utilize PSTN, VoIP, smartphones, and more. Administrators can also monitor their activities in real-time, making it no different from an office experience.
Oh, did I mention the multi-time zone feature in our cloud-based call center that ensures all your reports are generated based on your specific time zone? And to top it off, your call center will never slow down due to lengthy updates. Plus, you’ll never have to pay for upgrades! At CBS Cloud Solutions, upgrades are rolled out as soon as they’re tested by the provider.
Additionally, cloud solutions often include advanced analytics and AI-powered features like sentiment analysis and speech recognition, allowing for a deeper understanding of customer needs and improved service quality.
Culturally relevant interactions play a pivotal role in shaping customer satisfaction and loyalty. Text-to-speech technology with dialect options ensures that customers feel understood and valued by providing an experience that aligns with their cultural background. As a result, businesses experience significant increases in customer satisfaction scores. Reduced wait times, coupled with personalized and context-aware interactions, all contribute to a positive overall brand perception and foster long-term customer loyalty.
“We are a large call center, and we can’t migrate to your cloud system!” This objection was actually voiced by one of our clients.
The good news is that there is a new methodology that can help you with this, called “Composable Business”.
It is a method to enable large enterprises to transition from old on-premises systems to cloud-based systems. Using it, enterprises migrate only specific functions to the cloud, instead of lifting and shifting all of their functions. In this way, the enterprise can benefit from the advantages of the cloud at a unique speed that suits its needs and capabilities. These advantages include facilitating budgeting and monitoring return on investment, and reducing risk.
Through this approach, improving your company’s customer experience does not have to be a radical overhaul of systems. Instead, you can make incremental improvements across separate business functions. Even relatively small changes can provide significant value to your customers, both in the physical and online worlds.
These changes can also benefit your organization as improving customer experience contributes to the company’s ability to reduce costs, improve customer conversion rates, achieve higher rates of cross-selling and upselling, and increase revenue.
Start with High-Value Customer Experience Projects:
In the realm of customer experience, what sets the configurable business approach apart is that instead of dealing with every customer experience your organization encounters, you carefully select the highest value customer relationships and work on those first.
Logix’s clients who have followed the configurable business approach have achieved remarkable results. One of our clients, a major kingdom-wide retailer, used the configurable business approach to create “frictionless” self-service transactions. As a result, they were able to improve revenue by 30%, accelerate time-to-market by 75%, and reduce customer complaint response times by 25%.
Prior to contracting, our client company was under pressure due to old systems and outdated processes. The market was changing, but their systems were not. Part of the work involved identifying which systems needed updating and which processes needed to be transformed.
Again, this was not a massive project. Rather, the retailer made relatively small changes in stages, starting with the processes most likely to yield the greatest improvements in customer experience.
“I think I need another system.”
On the surface, this comment seems like a customer who is unhappy with the results of our system, but surprisingly, it is the comment of a business owner who wants to provide better customer experiences through a complementary system.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System:
The system acts as a database containing confidential customer details. As such, it provides a comprehensive and integrated view of the customer journey in real time.
In addition, a CRM system provides businesses with actionable insights into service inquiries and issues, direct and indirect sales, and customer behavior analysis.
Strengths of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System:
– Sales Force Automation (SFA): One of the most prominent functions of CRM systems, which, as its name suggests, automates sales and business processes, monitors customer interactions, and forecasts sales through performance evaluation.
– Customer Service and Case Management: Enables companies to monitor any customer or service-related issues. It also links customer inquiries to a specific customer and uses them as examples to train and guide support staff in finding solutions.
– Marketing Automation: Automates marketing tasks – such as customer segmentation – to help manage campaigns.
– Customer Reporting: An inherent data system that provides companies with an overview of sales, marketing, and customer interaction functions. Additionally, companies can rely on data to manage customer operations on a daily basis.
Why are CCaaS and CRM systems considered highly compatible solutions?
While a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system caters to the needs of customer accounts and their sales, a cloud-based call center (CCaaS) provides a solid foundation for customer communication. In other words, CCaaS connects customers to companies, while CRM seamlessly manages information to and from customers, opening new horizons for improving customer experience.
What are the benefits of integrating the two systems?
– Seamless Integration:
It’s crucial to use a cloud-based contact center as a service (CCaaS) that integrates seamlessly with your customer relationship management (CRM) software. This integration updates systems with real-time scenarios and monitors various processes. As a result, customer service representatives can access up-to-date data while handling customer inquiries and issues.
– Different Technologies for Better Solutions:
Integrating the two systems improves productivity in sales, marketing, customer service, and other operations. The two technologies also complement each other to enhance their unique features and deliver robust customer service. Above all, various functions such as automated call capabilities and pop-ups for call delivery are coordinated. This expands the scope of customer experience and interaction.
– Flexibility and Reliability:
According to research, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. Therefore, contact center managers and directors need operational data that analyzes customer behavior.
Moreover, regardless of their industry, companies need reliable and agile solutions to manage customer interactions. This is what the integration of CCaaS and CRM systems provides by enhancing access to information about customer opinions and updated interactions.
Cloud solutions are here to stay:
Contact centers as a cloud service (CCaaS) are transforming the customer experience. With continuous upgrades, CCaaS becomes the ideal platform to support a team dedicated to customer care. For example, geographic routing—where calls can be directed to a support employee in the same city as the customer—makes the connection more personal and relevant in the customer’s mind.
