It appears that cloud system infrastructure services or infrastructure as a service (IaaS) will lead the race and grow 27.5 percent in 2019 to reach $38.9 billion, up from $30.5 billion in 2018. Cloud application infrastructure services, according to Gartner, are to show the growth rate of 21.8 percent, which puts them in the second place among the fastest-growing cloud service market sectors.
A growing number of organizations around the world consider cloud technologies as a relatively simple and highly efficient tool of digital transformation. Cloud technologies offer a wide range of cutting-edge features promising to upgrade enterprise-wide workflows, eliminate business process administration hassles, and empower employees across all organization levels and departments.
A contact center as a forefront of almost any business has to evolve along with customers’ demands and expectations. Thus, it has to adapt to omnichannel reality where customers migrate across channels and expect the organization to follow them, capture their actions data, and provide proactive support. To meet these expectations, businesses need to embrace efficient, powerful, and flexible CX environments, which are able to leverage the benefits of omnichannel approach and cut expenses on digital transformation.
That’s How an Efficient Contact Center Looks Like
According to Gartner, the evolution of contact centers into customer experience centers fuels the demand for feature-rich omnichannel cloud solutions. More and more often businesses choose platforms supporting non-voice functionality: email, web chat, video chat, social media channels, and so on. Meanwhile, voice-based interactions make up a large proportion of brand communications. Since customer experience strategies became more customer-centric across all channels, the benefits of comprehensive solutions delivering voice and non-voice functionality as a package from a single vendor become more and more desired.
Modern cloud contact center solutions ensure simple and agile business rule management for routing, queuing, and escalating customer interactions across voice and non-voice channels. That means you may guide your customers’ journeys in your channels of choice and build a seamless and satisfying customer experience with less effort.
To guide customer journeys efficiently, you need strong analytic capabilities at hand, as well as insightful and well-designed workforce management system. A multichannel or omnichannel single vendor cloud solution delivers all these features in a package, putting out the need to integrate operational performance data siloed in standalone systems.
A single cloud-based platform also delivers ubiquitous tools for handling diverse customer interaction scenarios in both voice and digital channels. Together with the ability to leverage the flexibility of the cloud, it provides a solid foundation for building intrinsically customer-centric CX environments.
Gartner reports that a 360-degree view of the customer, formed by capturing data across digital channels considered by organizations as a key factor of customer service success. Moreover, a lot of companies rank cloud-based Artificial Intelligence and chat-bot features as very promising set of technologies to enhance their CX-strategies in the nearest future.
Reasons to Embrace Cloud CX
First of all, cloud contact center solutions enable easy shift from capital to operational expenses on a contact center. Many businesses struggle with their partially outdated legacy on-premises solutions that demand costly upgrades and integrations with emerging digital products. Migrating from a capital expenditure purchase model to an operating expenditure model makes solution replacement less expensive than legacy system upgrade. Thus, a company can obtain omnichannel customer experience capabilities without substantial long-term investments and save on solution deployment time because typically it takes much less time to deploy a cloud contact center than to implement or upgrade on-premises products.
After migration to the cloud a company may flexibly adjust its agent license payments. The cloud contact center enables scaling up and down at any time, whether you need to handle a holiday season demand spike, survive a low demand period or major market swing episode. By embracing a cloud contact center model you get the opportunity to grow-as-you-go and not to overbook agent licenses now, when you don’t even know if you ever really need them.
Moreover, with the cloud contact center solution you may free up your in-house IT staff resource. The on-premise omnichannel contact center environment is a package of sophisticated cutting-edge applications, and that might be a real challenge to manage them properly. Switching to a cloud-based solution may significantly decrease demand for in-house IT engineers.
And even without a large team of high-skilled IT experts you will be able to explore new contact center functionality in cloud environments. Deploying new features on-premises may be tedious and risky. It usually requires a lot of time and effort, and outcomes may prove surprisingly poor. In a cloud contact center you can switch any given feature on and off with zero risk and at minimal cost even if the trial turns out to be a complete failure.
Last but not the least, a cloud contact center can be a lower-cost, lower-effort option to support distributed contact center operations. Even small geographically separated teams with distinctive business needs will feel comfortable using a single feature-rich cloud solution.
PureCloud Brings Pure Customer Experience Benefits
Genesys, a long-time leader in the Gartner and Forrester annual contact center solution reports, offers an all-in-one cloud customer engagement and employee collaboration solution Genesys PureCloud.
In 2018 Genesys was recognized as a Leader for the PureCloud® platform in "The Forrester Wave: Cloud Contact Centers, Q3 2018" report. Beyond that, Genesys has been named a Leader in the “Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting a Multichannel Cloud Contact Center Solution, 2017-18” study.
Genesys partner in Romania is Intrarom, that complements the Genesys Contact Center portfolio with a comprehensive set of professional services including consultancy, design, implementation, configuration/parameterization, customization, integration with 3rd party systems testing, and development.
PureCloud delivers rich functionality for collaboration, communication, and customer engagement. The solution is highly scalable, reliable, and secure, built on a long-time-proven and highly-reliable Amazon Web Services cloud platform. It offers elastic architecture built on well-designed microservices.
PureCloud delivers advanced customer experience tools in a complete cloud package that is easy to set up, use, and budget for. It drives customer experience excellence across web, chat, email, voice, and social engagement channels, providing comprehensive access to omnichannel customer history and enabling deep personalization for every contact – on the single platform. So customers can have consistent and contextual interaction with the brand anytime they want, regardless of who they are interacting with or what channel they are using.
PureCloud provides automated intelligent interaction routing capabilities to optimize agent workloads or direct customers to the right expert for a faster problem resolution. Skill-based routing turns every connection into a successful interaction that exceeds customers’ expectations. Every interaction, regardless the channel, is prioritized in a universal queue configured according to your own business rules. PureCloud aligns customers with the most appropriate agent and drive better results. It also presents efficient agents monitoring tools to ensure peak contact center performance. All through an intuitive web interface available for the desktop or mobile.
With a common user interface framework and data integration through open APIs, a unified agent desktop integrates all customer data across all interaction channels, as well as delivers insightful data from CRM systems and other sales-related systems. The solution keeps customer information at the ready, giving agents accurate insights into the customer history and preferences. The unified desktop provides agents with easy-to-use tools to deliver high-quality service: to process customer contacts, including receiving, consulting, transferring, and completing interactions; to enter notes, call disposition, and reason codes; to receive individual and team KPI data and gain insights into their own performance.
The platform provides holistic analytics and performance management metrics, no matter where your agents are located or which channels they handle. PureCloud analytics provides real-time dashboards with rich live data, encompassing all types of customer interactions, individual agents and agent teams performance, etc. With the PureCloud platform, there is no need to rely on disparate data sources to get comprehensive performance data. Built-in workforce optimization capabilities provide multichannel recording, quality management, performance monitoring, customer feedback capturing, and more.
PureCloud frees your employees up of any location or hardware limitations. It supports remote connection giving contact center teams access to communication channels from a single application, on any device. Employees can use video, softphone, screen sharing, dynamic and persistent chat channels, rich employee profiles, and document management—all in one comprehensive solution. Remote agents will have a pain-free access to the platform, and there is no need to install sophisticated software or maintain dedicated devices.
Cloud-hosted, the solution does not require any hardware or software installation or integration; the PureCloud platform deploys in days and scales automatically. The PureCloud multi-tenant cloud offering has been architected for continuous delivery of new features and is constantly enhanced. Internet access is all you need to connect and engage across the world.
PureCloud is ideal for organizations looking for a simple ready-to-go contact center solution starting at just 5 seats and flexibly scaling up to 500+ agent workplaces.
Customer experience now plays a role of key brand differentiator in almost any type of business. Customers often value experience more than product price. Companies have to keep up with growing expectations or they inevitably face grievous consequences like customer churn and demand decline. To meet customers’ expectations, businesses need highly flexible and cost-effective tools, which may be offered by cloud solutions. Moving to the cloud provides access to top CX functionality, helps avoid massive capital investment, and allows focusing on core business processes. The cloud deployment provides rapid and hassle-free innovation delivery, instant upgrades and unrestricted scalability, as well as unparalleled business agility and employee performance boost.
