If you had to answer the question concerning your cloud contact center solution, would you say it is cloud-born, cloud-enabled, or unsure?
You could ask, does it matter if a contact center is cloud-born? What difference does it make?
I’ll put it in perspective. A girl born in New York is most likely to explore and know the city’s best places than a tourist who comes visiting.
It would take the tourist some time to get used to the new terrain, while the girl who has lived there would find it easy navigating through every aspect of the city.
What is a cloud call center?
A could call center is an internet-accessible call center that enables communication across several channels without physical hardware.
Call exchanges managed over the cloud, replacing PBX systems and server rooms while cutting maintenance fees and maximizing ROI.
It can access your call center anywhere using a web platform, either on a PC, Smartphone, Phablet, or Tablet.
One can say that the possibilities are endless for a cloud call center. You say goodbye to license restrictions and welcome APIs to enhance your productivity.
Reaching and satisfying customers is more of a lifestyle on cloud call centers. The ease of being where your customers are makes it even more convenient and blissful.
Cloud contact center solutions are slowly substituting the on-premise call centers. According to the State of Customer Experience 2018, the migration of 39% of contact centers in the United Kingdom to the cloud, with 57% of them chalking out an action plan to move to cloud-based call centers within the next three years, indicates the potential for the overall market.
You could read more about cloud call centers and what differentiates them from on-premise systems.
What does it mean to be cloud-native?
Any application built on the cloud, running its functions while maximizing cloud infrastructure benefits, is cloud-born. They can also be called cloud natives. A could-born solution delivers exclusively via the cloud.
On the other hand, cloud-enabled solutions were designed to deliver services through legacy data centers but now operate in the cloud.
Cloud-enabled solutions often drag along some baggage, such as costs on maintenance and scaling, single-tenant and constraint on scaling up or down.
What is a cloud contact center solution?
Like other cloud-born solutions in different industries, cloud-native call centers increase your business’s efficiency and productivity.
Cloud Call center software maximizes limitless opportunities to achieve scalability, quickly adapt to advances in technology and dynamism of customer demands.
Headaches of increased staff numbers and routine checks – commonly associated with hardware – are eliminated. Less time is wasted on integrations and upgrades; while costing less.
Customer experience is better improved with cloud-born call centers as it opens up multiple channels to connect with customers and deliver a more personalized experience.
Working with cloud-enabled infrastructure could be rigid and probably cost more money on resources, maintenance, and upgrades than cloud-born solutions.
What makes your contact center solution cloud-native?
- Infinite scalability
- Multi-tenant functionality
- OS independent
- Multi-layer security
- Serverless
- Public API for quick and easy integration
Several “cloud-born” and cloud-enabled call center providers limit their customers from experiencing the boundless opportunities cloud infrastructure can offer call center operations.
The following features are critical for a total cloud experience;
Infinitely Scalable
The limitation of adding or removing agents to your call center indicates that your contact center isn’t maximizing cloud technology.
Scalability ensures top performance and efficiency irrespective of changes in cycles – increased or decreased call volumes, upsizing, or downsizing.
Call center studio understands the business terrain’s realities and offers the freedom to scale up or scale down, adapting to your changing needs.
Agents added during peak periods become redundant when call volume reduces. Deactivating users is an easy process. If users aren’t active, Call Center Studio stores them on the platform at no extra cost.
Multi-tenant
For small businesses, multi-tenancy provides an opportunity to set up lower maintenance, cost-effective and full-featured call centers in the Cloud.
Each tenant operates in virtual isolation. Individual data remains separate, invisible, and secure from other tenants, yet they all share web servers, infrastructure services, databases, and memory.
Admin roles and permission levels control who can view, manage, and operate the contact center.
Your business can share high-end resources while keeping data secure and invisible to other tenants.
Multi-tenancy ensures that system-wide updates – new features, integrations, bug fixes – are available to everyone through the Single Instance feature.
Single instance eliminates delayed or phased rollout of features and treats every customer’s issue as a priority. The resolution of problems benefits all customers and is shelled out universally across clients.
On the other hand, cloud-enabled call centers don’t maximize single Instances as they are often single-tenant. This means that any issue within the platform can be specific to just one account. That usually results in the provider prioritizing issues based on the client’s size rather than its severity.
The dynamism of technology calls for a regular update to the software features to meet up with demands. Furthermore, these updates should be timely and globally pushed out to users.
OS independent
Operating a call center accessible from anywhere, on any device by your agents is one of the critical perks of a cloud-born call center.
Cloud-native call centers don’t require a specific operating system to function optimally. All that is needed is a web browser and a softphone that is built-in in the software.
OS independent solutions function on various hardware platforms or software architectures and can be used in many different environments, requiring minimum setup processes.
Call Center Studio gives you access to your contact center from any device or browser that is HTML 5 supported.
A Cloud-born call center can be classified as a plug-and-play device with little or no constraints to your agents.
Multi-layer Security
Like with every other system, call centers experience downtimes and security threats.
However, what separates a cloud-born call center is the ability to handle redundancy and threat through a multi-layer resistance system.
Call Center Studio is built on Google cloud infrastructure, thereby encrypting every connection to the cloud in a multi-layer defense system to help protect customers against network attacks like denial of service.
To meet your regulatory and policy objectives, you also get security, privacy, and compliance certifications such as ISO/IEC, SOC, PCI DSS, CSA STAR, and GDPR.
Enjoy secure deployment of services, secure data storage with end-user privacy safeguards, secure communications between services, secure and private communication with customers over the internet, and administrators’ safe operation.
Serverless
Cloud-enabled call centers sometimes still rely on servers; hence they have limited scalability. Their customers need to inform the vendor, and the vendor needs to make adjustments to the server they are hosting their operation. This translates to added cost and lost time.
With the advent of cloud technology, that has changed. Companies don’t need to build their servers to offer exceptional services to their customers.
A cloud-born call center maximizes serverless operations delivery, a pay-as-you-use infrastructure with (almost) no server management.
You don’t need to spend money or time on deployment (networking, dependencies, maintenance, etc.), which a cloud-born call center automatically handles.
This allows your call center to focus on optimizing your communication with customers, manage their expectations, and deliver excellent experiences.
Public API for Quick and easy integration
You don’t need a total reset of your already set-up process when switching your contact center solution.
A cloud contact center solution eliminates the delayed process of setting up connections to third-party applications vital to your call center’s smooth and convenient operation through a public API.
A public API (also known as open API) provides businesses with quick and easy integration to proprietary software applications or web services.
If your business uses a specific customer relationship management (CRM) software or payment gateway, it would only be logical to switch to a provider that will easily integrate your existing applications without hassle.
Quick and easy integration enhances your business’s productivity and customer experience.
What’s next?
Having read the highlighted points, would you say your cloud contact center solution is cloud-native or cloud-enabled? Here is a case study demonstrating the implementation of cloud-born features for call center outsourcing companies.
We offer a free consultation session to discuss any questions you may have about cloud solutions. Speak to an expert.