Make room, Zeus – there’s a new eye in the sky.
In recent years, many industries have seen a gradual evaporation of traditional in-house contact centers, which have been replaced by the cloud. Cloud-based contact centers are on the rise, and a January 2014 report from Aberdeen titled, “Public Cloud vs. On-Premise: How to More Effectively Deploy a Contact Center,” reveals that 31% of company contact centers already function in the cloud.
The concept of having a cloud-based contact center can seem an amorphous, frightening endeavor for some companies who may not fully understand the benefits. The truth is that there are significant advantages to making the transition to a cloud-based contact center, foremost among them being cost savings.
In-house contact centers necessitate large up-front capital expenditures and fixed costs. Cloud contact centers trim unnecessary spending because companies will only pay expenses based on system utilization.
As a result, expenditures will inevitably vary depending on the industry. Nevertheless, the payoff is substantial. Aberdeen’s research shows that public cloud users outperform in-house users in cross-sell and up-sell revenue by 7%. What’s more, the cost per cloud customer contact is more than half the cost of an in-house user, and there is a 6.7% positive differential in customer retention.
While cloud contact centers have risen above traditional in-store centers, they are still eclipsed by many best-in-class contact centers; public cloud centers maintain a 64% customer retention rate, best-in-class centers hold an 82% customer retention rate.
One of the most important considerations for any successful cloud contact center is scaling, growing a company’s center proportionately according to the volume of customer traffic. Organizations who fail to make this adjustment will miss out on critical opportunities to meet customer needs, the study says.
Additionally, cloud contact centers benefit service agents by providing them with the best technology tools that they may not otherwise have in an in-house setting. Such tools often take the form of timely customer insight data, scheduled time interval assessments of contact center processes, and agents’ real-time access to their own daily performance statistics.
For cloud contact centers, the ceiling is open to vast improvement and potential to meet best-in-class contact centers. Aberdeen suggests a number of recommendations for reaching those goals, including ending unnecessary expenditures and streamlining processes to improve customer retention year-over-year.
What’s more, companies can learn more about their customers better by utilizing customer history, coupled with predictive analytics, to develop well-rounded profiles–all of which will decrease the chance for headaches and complications down the road.
The time has come to close the door on in-house contact centers. By building and optimizing successful cloud contact centers, organizations have the power to push their customer service strategies toward new and profitable horizons.