How to Design cost efficient Contact Center Solutions?
A contact center is simply an advanced version of a typical call center. Unlike call centers, they provide support via multiple platforms including calls, emails, chats, and VoIP. One of the major drawbacks of the traditional contact center services is its high cost of establishment and maintenance. Besides that, good quality equipment, well-trained staffs, their availability are all factors affecting the functionality of a contact center.
One big challenge is how to do more with less, without compromising on performance and customer satisfaction. Cloud contact center solutions can address most of the drawbacks of a traditional contact center. Companies are switching over to the cloud platform considering the fact that cloud can bring significant cost reduction in both set-up and maintenance. Survey results say more than 62 percent of the existing companies have already moved to the cloud or are planning it.
To design contact center solutions that are cost efficient, you need to first identify the cost-consuming areas and the alternative solutions offered by cloud services.
Workforce Management:-There are some interesting features available with cloud contact center solutions that can significantly cut down the staff requirements. If many calls have a common topic, implementing an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) could reduce the need for live agent support. Cloud contact center services offer auto receptionist feature, which can efficiently handle calls throughout the day. Out of office hours could be smartly overcome using the setup.
There are contact center solutions that provide advanced reporting features. While real-time reporting gives you a clear idea about the agent activities, answered calls, abandoned calls, talk time, etc historical reports help you learn about the call history and agents queue details. Call monitoring and barging lets the supervisors eavesdrop on a customer service call. The supervisor can correct or train the agent without the knowledge of the customer. Call recording allows the supervisor to record and download the voice file at any point in time. Hot desking (allocating devices to workers when they are required or on a rotating system, rather than giving each worker their own device.) is another great feature you need to consider when planning for a cost-efficient contact center as working shifts and hot desking go hand in hand. The call queue features allow callers to know their queue position. If they have to wait for a fairly long time, the caller can leave a voicemail and the agents will give a callback.
Cost of Communication:- Cloud-based contact centers are hosted on a cloud provider’s internet server and therefore set up and maintenance cost of the server can be considerably reduced. Most of the connections are provided on a subscription model. Hosted cloud solutions may be upgraded inexpensively and can test the service with free trials and if it fits the business requirements, the user can later upgrade to a pay as you use model. Annual commitment, bundle offers are all some perks of a cloud-based contact center solutions.
Cloud-based call centers are accessible anywhere via the internet and function the same as other contact centers. You need not have to make any additional payment for extensions. Besides that, Cloud allows customer support from practically any device. Be it your mobile device or a softphone. This enables agents to work remotely from home even at times of a natural calamity or an unpredictable weather condition.