By Uthaman Bakthikrishnan, Executive Vice President, ClearTouch
While planning ways to boost your company’s efficiency and profitability, you may have discovered that outsourcing certain business processes, such as call centre operations, would be a critical component of achieving this goal efficiency and profitability. As disruptive as the pandemic has been for various sectors, call centres only witnessed an expansion of coverage area as well as the call volume for contact centres globally. Lately, they’ve emerged as key hubs of sales, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the modern era as there’s no growth-oriented business that can thrive without efficient and constantly evolving contact centres. Migrating the operations of these call centres from on-premises to cloud-based and using sophisticated routing allows you to seamlessly interface with a dispersed workforce from a centralised location.
A hosted call centre solution integrates easily with your existing phone, Private Branch Exchange (PBX), and Customer resource Management (CRM) technology, and supervisors gain real-time visibility into agents’ status as well as full control over quality and performance. Furthermore, an Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) system routes incoming calls to multi-site locations and specific agents based on customer need and agent skill set.
A cloud-based solution allows you to scale up or down the number of agents in minutes while still managing fluctuating volumes for inbound, outbound, sales, and service calls. It also allows for the creation of multi-tenant accounts for separation, while only paying for what you use. Scaling up or down to meet demand is simple, and you can view historical data for each client in simple charts and graphs with simplified reporting.
Managing two vendors for communications can often be a hassle, causing delays in finding the root cause of a problem when there is downtime. Choosing a Cloud Contact centre as a service vendor will help you minimize your downtime and increase productivity while keeping costs low. A CcaaS provider will manage the technology and telecommunications and provide an end-to-end managed service for your communication needs. Having this type of vendor will ensure smooth operations and enable you to focus on your core business.
Further to upgrading your contact centre to deliver a technology-led omnichannel end-to-end customer experience, working with the right managed service providers (MSPs) helps keep your focus on core business capabilities. Managed Services is an umbrella term for an outsourcing arrangement with a technology partner, wherein they take the responsibility for the operations and lifecycle management of the technology and telecom aspect of it. Outsourcing technology operational support can help hugely optimize contact centre performance.A managed service technology partner provides solutions based on a wide cross-industry knowledge. This can make it easier to effect reliable and rapid change, with the potential to deploy upgraded hybrid cloud-based solutions quickly, without disrupting the main business focus.
Managers can also create and schedule reports for efficient workflow, as well as analyse real-time metrics with live dashboards that provide insight into real-time agent and caller analytics. This makes it simple to identify and improve key performance indicators (KPIs) to gain insight into agent activities.
You can set real-time alerts to notify you when agents exceed thresholds, and tracking KPIs helps every member of your organisation stay focused on their goals so that everyone can work together to achieve common success.
When data is collected in the cloud, it is simple to export raw call data for further refinement and to segment groups, customers, and portfolios for client-specific reporting and compliance. Furthermore, by collecting inbound and outbound dialer historical dates from your ACD, you can better align resources and understand calling patterns, lowering labour costs.
With lower total cost of ownership and pay-as-you-go (pay only for what you use) pricing, it’s easy to see why so many on premise, hardware-based call centres are migrating to cloud-hosted solutions.