So, you have probably read many articles about cloud contact center features and watched numerous reviews on why you should switch from on-premise to cloud-based contact centers. One thing remains a doubt in your mind; “how do I identify just the right solution for my business?”
The popularity of Cloud-based contact centers has significantly increased over the years, with reports stating that the market is expected to grow from USD 6.8 billion in 2017 to USD 20.9 billion by 2022, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 25.2% during the forecast period.
Businesses are expected to move from the conventional on-premise to cloud-based infrastructure to stay ahead of customer demands and technology advancement.
Having stated that cloud-based contact centers are the future, how can your business decide which cloud contact center provider to settle for a long-term relationship with. Below are key contact center features to help your decision making;
Best Contact Center Features Every Provider Should Have
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Skills-Based Routing Cloud Contact center
- Flexible pricing structure
- Real-time Reporting & Analytics
- Omnichannel routing
Skills-Based Routing Cloud Contact center
How does the contact center of an online shopping platform like eBay handle a customer calling in for details relating to designer shoes?
The traditional contact centers based on Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) had every customer call redirected to available Call center agents without considering an agent‘s skill sets.
However, with advancements in technology, Call center agents have become more specialized and requests based on inherent skills.
When a customer calls in with a need relating to a specific field, Skill-Based Routing ensures that agents with the best-fit skillset get a first-hand look at such requests, thereby improving personalized customer experience. This feature is fundamental for cloud contact center providers.
Flexible Pricing Structure
One of the significant drags of on-premise contact centers is fixed costs irrespective of scale. Besides that, there’s also the cost of training in-house technical staff and maintenance. Arrrgghhh! All of this, and yet there are uncertainties from the unknowns, e.g., a pandemic breakout. Who would’ve thought of this!
A large cloud-based contact center has no server hardware, maintenance, or technical staff cost, with a SaaS pay-as-you-go model allows a business to scale up or down in minutes.
Call Center Studio‘s Softphone provides a lowered cost on equipment with a native WebRTC that eliminates being locked into any expensive hardware system.
As one of the most accessible call center software, your training time and costs are minimal. You get 24/7 support and a dedicated project manager.
Real-time Reporting & Analytics
Improving inbound or outbound sales is a concern for businesses because a business that isn’t converting leads to sales is walking on the lines of losing to competitors. One of the critical ways of boosting sales is by understanding the demands of your customers.
Understanding customer need is best achieved by effective reporting and analysis of data. What are your customers asking? How do your agents handle requests? What is the first-time resolution rate per agent? What is the satisfaction rating from your customers?
These are reporting metrics that inform data-driven decision-making for your business. With the right cloud-based contact center software, you get built-in Google BI & Analytics for real-time monitoring, contact history, and graphical custom reporting for fast insight into your team’s performance.
KPIs and quality metrics are also displayed in real-time and kept for as long as you need.
You can also access the performance of your IVRs to identify potential challenges such as call abandonment rate or drill down into specific branches of call flows.
As excellent customer experience and employee satisfaction are not mutually exclusive, it is vital to take care of the agent experience through tracking reporting & analytics metrics.
Omnichannel routing
This is one of the essential cloud contact center features. No one likes to repeat their issues to contact centers repeatedly, especially when these issues persist. This time, I had a problem with a telecom network and had earlier reached out to them via Facebook messenger. I got a response saying my issue had been forwarded to the in-house team for resolution.
Having waited for a couple of hours with no response, I decided to give their contact center a call. To my disappointment, I had to explain myself repeatedly despite identifying myself and explaining I had earlier reached out using Facebook messenger.
These issues shouldn’t be part of your contact center as it discourages customers and spurs them to look for better alternatives.
70% of customers crave a seamless process when they reach out to contact centers, irrespective of their previous communication channel, and expect continued conversations quickly. Another 59% say tailored engagement based on past interactions is critical.
Getting a cloud-based contact center provider with omnichannel routing enhances your business to deliver a personalized and seamless customer experience as every contact channel is brought into one dashboard.
Thanks to our public API, we can integrate into most CRMs and log all customer interactions from different platforms onto a dashboard.
AI-Powered IVR
Conventional IVR flows have become annoying to callers who have to wait in queues with limited button options and no personalized experiences. They more often end up with the possibility of speaking to an agent.
Such IVR flows, if not designed perfectly, aren’t flexible and fail to record customer journeys such as a new or a returning caller; neither does it consider the context of calls.
AI-powered IVR is equipped with Automated Speech Recognition (ASR), Speech to text (STT), Text to Speech (TTS), and Google Dialogflow features to enable the personalized conversational experience.
Sentiment analysis enhances customer experiences through understanding the caller’s intent and gauging their emotional state.
With conversational IVR, customers can interact with your system using their voice and words rather than their fingers. Here’s a case study for your reference.
Public API for Quick Integration
When considering your business choices for a cloud-based contact center, give yourself some extra time to ensure that it allows quick and easy integration with other applications such as CRM software, Payment solutions, Chat solutions, and many more.
Integrations increase your business’s productivity, reduce wasted time due to manual processes and IT resources, and help you scale for future growth.
It’s crucial to choose cloud contact center providers with a Public API that provides web services for every event on the software, such as calling, campaigns, recording, transferring, or reporting.
Some providers have built-in integrations with popular applications such as SAP, Salesforce, Zoho, MS Dynamics, Ingenico, WhatsApp Business, Facebook Messenger, and Webchats.
AI-Powered Chatbot
Messaging is the most popular human-to-human communication in today’s world, with over 560 billion texts exchanged monthly worldwide. Whatsapp records more than 65 billion messages every day.
Chatbots help streamlines B2C interaction and enhances efficiency in resolving customer requests, improving customer experience, and minimizing operational costs.
According to a report by MIT Technology, 90% of businesses report faster complaint resolution with bots. Data obtained from chatbots can be analyzed to understand consumer needs better and improve service.
With the aid of Google Dialogflow, chatbots can understand consumers through machine learning, match queries entered from any channel, and give the best-fit feedback.
This increases businesses’ efficiency and allows agents to focus on the more complex issues that require their attention.
Customizable Dialer
With a customizable dialer, you can increase the efficiency of your agents. Functionalities such as the predictive dialer initiate outbound call from a contact list automatically and sequentially.
A predictive dialer uses predictive statistical algorithms to place outbound calls based on agents’ availability and each call’s duration. With this feature, the dialer can forecast the next call’s length due to AI-powered machine learning.
Multiple outbound calls are placed for each available agent, keeping the dialing and connecting rate constant. This helps contact centers to curtail agent idle time significantly.
The predictive algorithm determines the percentage of customers likely to answer outbound calls from the contact list and estimates the time agents will require handling the calls. This feature is customizable to fit your contact center needs.
Depending on the type of campaign, Call Center Studio offers you the option to customize the predictive dialer to call each number on a list per available agent, thus acting as a progressive dialer.
A progressive dialer is also functional when the communication regulations do not allow for a Predictive dialer.
Added features can be implemented with a CRM integration to run a Preview dialer where the agent can see the contact history ensuring excellent support. With a click-to-call feature, the stress of manual dialing is eliminated, alongside the possibilities of dialing errors.
Furthermore, when a live agent is not entirely necessary, an IVR dialer allows for informative, confirmation, or even straightforward collection campaigns as they can be integrated with a payment gateway.
Even better, by using Google’s Dialogflow, you can have an AI-powered agent handle your outbound campaigns.
The above-listed contact center features are what every business should be looking for when choosing a contact center software.
Are you in contact with several cloud contact center providers and still unsure about your choice for a cloud-based contact center solution? Speak to an expert
