Are you ready to be a digital disruptor?

Ok, the digital transformation in the contact centre is here, as I outlined in my previous post. So how do we keep up, how do we become a digital disruptor?

The answer is the cloud. It is no longer an option but the option. It is imperative to adopt the cloud if you want to embrace digital transformation and enable more personalised customer experiences.

But not just any cloud will do. The ideal is a Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) model, with pre-configured systems and small management overhead.

As Ovum points out: “The industry-wide “move to the cloud” is not just about the location of the servers or the cost model. It is a recognition by many… that the operating environment has become too complex to manage effectively.”

You need to look for a technology partner who can deliver on the below.

Customer experience as the competitive edge: Is chat not engaging enough for customers? Try video chat. See if it appeals to your customers, and if it does roll out the service quickly. Similarly, you can personalise the experience and connect in different ways, depending on the value of that customer. For example, one multinational bank catering for high net worth individuals differentiated its services in a highly-competitive market by providing good quality video connections for customers to get advice from remote experts.

Integrated end-to-end SLA: An all-in-one contact centre platform, which is integrated and modular, allows you to tailor customers’ experiences at speed, and with a fully integrated SLA across geographies. Above all, it’s the perfect testing platform to discover the best ways to interact with customers – without having to commit to any upfront investment.

Quality of service: The quality of customer service ultimately depends on having a simple hosted cloud-based contact centre solution from a single provider, saving you the time and money involved in having to manage many suppliers.

Scalability and flexibility: Some peak demand times are predictable, like holidays and festivals, the summer travel season, and monthly billing cycles. Other traffic spikes are not so easy to prepare for. You need to have the flexibility to meet these fluctuations. With a hosted service you can distribute and balance workloads, providing the resilience and availability needed to support business continuity, while delivering a consistently good experience, wherever in the world your customers are.

Ultimately, you have to decide the best contact centre strategy to meet your business demands. But whether you build your own in-house facilities, or look for outsourced capabilities, there is one critical component that is indispensable to your success – an end-to-end SLA.

Find out more about how to realise your hosted contact centre in the cloud. This is Part 3 of a series of blogs on the topic of the contact centre: read the full series by starting with Part 1.