With managers continuing to uncover the many advantages of technology, cloud infrastructure has become the fastest-growing call centre market sector.
In addition to the widely-reported cost benefits, cloud contact centres offer scalable anyone access, easy integration with existing systems, and a variety of features that help organisations deliver excellent customer service. But cutting-edge technology can only do so much; sometimes, you need a little bit more insight to implement a successful cloud-based contact centre.
If you’re a manager contemplating leveraging a cloud-based contact centre, here are five essential questions you need to ask yourself before you proceed with your planning and contract discussions.
- Have you mapped out your customer journey?
Defining and understanding customer touchpoints is crucial to improving each step on the customer journey. Not taking the time to map it, end-to-end is a mistake. So too is thinking that it starts later than it does.
For example, by the time a customer reaches a voice on the phone, they may already be dissatisfied. They may have been on hold for too long or sent through a confusing maze of IVR. That means that you’re already on the back foot before you’ve even begun. By understanding all elements of your customer journey, you can start to optimise and streamline the customer experience.
As a contact centre, it’s your responsibility to check all the boxes in your call flow process and mark it down, measure and optimise. This way, you’ll thoroughly understand their journey from their perspective and make positive continuous improvements.
- Who requires access to what and when?
When implementing any cloud-based contact centre, different team members and stakeholders will require different features and different levels of access. Therefore, you need to consider your approach to access rights. Important questions to ask here include: what features will your middle and senior managers require access to? Are these different from the features needed by your sales team? And who will be the system administrator for your network? After determining your team’s access needs, you can start to map out your call routing requirements.
It may be appropriate to initially adopt a hybrid contact centre strategy, or consider cloud services with APIs that can automate and accelerate the migration. It may also make sense to migrate mission-critical elements of your current system so that you can deploy new services, increase flexibility, and experience the expected cost-benefit.
- Will you integrate customer-friendly solutions?
Think about the new solutions that you could implement alongside your migration to help improve your customer experience. For example, some businesses frustrate their customers with the use of interactive voice response (IVR) systems that are difficult to navigate. A major benefit of the cloud contact centre is that it can easily incorporate computer telephony integration (CTI). This allows for the provision of intelligent IVRs, which can offer the use of dynamic menus that help customers speak with the correct person, faster.
- Do you want to monitor & report on metrics?
A cloud contact centre with computer telephony integration (CTI) will also offer your organisation the opportunity to compile smart reports that deliver greater operational understanding. You’ll be able to access a wealth of data in the form of detailed reports on important service, sales and marketing metrics. These may include the number of prospects agents are currently engaging, customer satisfaction scores and retention rates. This knowledge can then be used to generate a better understanding of your sales and customer service successes.
- What new agent skills will we need?
Successful migrations require analysis of the skills that your agents possess. Beyond the basics of voice and text-based communications, agents are increasingly required to handle more complex issues. This may require the integration of more knowledge bases. In addition, agents are likely to need better soft skills to help them manage challenging customer escalations, which may require additional training.
You’ll want to start your analysis by determining the mix of hard and soft skills needed to support your new customer journeys. You may need to acquire certain tools and create a training curriculum to teach them. At the same time, the need for new skills may impact your hiring practices as you seek to recruit agents who already hold these specific skills. Investing time in ensuring staff are trained on the new system and its requirements will pay for itself many times over.
The Way Forward
Organisations can get optimum results for their contact centre, provided they use the right solution providers that can meet their business requirements.
GSN pioneered the cloud contact centre in Australia in 2003, and we continue to deliver innovative solutions to help Australian businesses make every connection count.
If you need help answering any of the questions above or want to learn more about a cloud contact centre migration with GSN, start by speaking with us. Our local team of experts can help you to define a solution that meets your needs now and will scale to meet them as things change.
No matter where you are with your contact centre journey, we can help.