Contact Centre in the Cloud, a new model emerges

1. LEADMASTER
White Paper
Contact Centres in the Cloud
- A New Model Emerges
LeadMaster – L6, 80 Mount Street, North Sydney NSW 2060 – Tel: 1 300 852 599 – CRMTeam@leadmaster.com.au

2. Introduction and
Background Information
With cloud Customers are an intrinsic part of every enterprise. Most of the major
models, the businesses operate contact centres to interact with their customers. The
companies can internal business operations such as help desk and sales support can be
clearly mention serviced through the contact centres. Agents (customer service
the cost of representatives) operate the contact centre through an extensive open
service in their workspace. The workstation of a traditional contact centre includes a
monthly budget computer for each agent, a headset connected to a telecom switch and one
reports. or more supervising stations. A contact centre can be networked with one
or more additional centres, often linked to mainframes, LANs and
microcomputers. The agents access various databases and spreadsheets to
retrieve the information needed to answer the queries of the customers.
Outgoing calls for product services and telemarketing calls are also handled
through contact centres. This is generally a part of customer relationship
management (CRM).
Cloud Solutions But this sort of customer service is generally inefficient. It consumes more
help the time and more resources. Long waiting time, inefficient call routing,
enterprises in improper information and various other issues make the customer service a
avoiding the laborious task for customers and agents. The changing economic conditions
surprises for and volatile hardware vendors pose significant challenges for contact
maintenance and centres. To address these issues, businesses are shifting to cloud
other services. computing models to enhance the capability of their contact centres. Cloud
model provides application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow the
contact centre functionality to be integrated with cloud based CRM
solutions. This white paper provides the compelling reasons for adopting
the cloud model in contact centres. Here we discuss various technical
advantages and business benefits of cloud based contact centers. These
advantages and benefits can be categorised as follows:
Advantages and Benefits
Good return on investment (ROI)
Huge capital investments are not required for cloud based contact centres.
The cloud solutions (hosted solutions) provide network based contact
centre functionality and are offered on a subscription model. The hosted
solutions can be delivered in less than one day. They are more cost
effective as they involve minimal set up costs.
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3. At least 75% of Contact centres all over the world are moving to hosted platforms at a
contact centres rapid pace. Gartner predicts that by 2013 at least 75% of contact centres
will be using will be using a form of cloud services. The cloud service is accessible from
cloud based any computer connected to the web and it doesn’t require client side
services by 2013. software. Apart from monthly fee per agent or per seat, there are no
hidden costs. The integration and implementation fee is low. The total cost
of ownership (TCO) is significantly less than the premised based services.
The companies can clearly mention the cost of service in their monthly
budget reports. This helps the companies in avoiding the surprises for
maintenance and other services. By using cloud models, the contact
centres can lower their costs by up to 43% over a five year period,
according to the new Frost & Sullivan research report. Some studies have
predicted that a hosted contact centre with 400 or more seats can save up
to 45% on TCO over five years.
Scalability
By adopting cloud The Asia-Pacific continues to be a high growth region for the contact centre
models, contact industry. The domestic demand for customer service continues to increase
centres can lower in developing markets such as India, China, Indonesia and Vietnam.
their cost by up Despite attrition, the growing contact centre market employed around 3.16
to 43% over a million agents in 2010. One of the biggest challenges faced by these
period of 5 years contact centres is agent scheduling. Scheduling the appropriate number of
agents based on call volumes is almost a constant juggling act. The
volumes may generally fluctuate as per the seasonal cycles.
The cloud platforms offer extreme scalability that is beneficial to businesses
with variable call volumes. They provide generic solutions that unite various
contact centres and work-from-home agents. With a hosted platform,
businesses can scale up or scale down the number of seats on a need basis.
The managers can login from any browser and can view the agent’s activity
in real time and monitor the calls irrespective of their location. There is no
need to invest in additional hardware in running the seasonal campaigns
that require more agents. With the capability of analytics, the hosted
solutions can forecast the accurate requirement of the agents for a given
shift. This boosts the productivity of the agent and customer satisfaction.
According to Frost & Sullivan analysis, the APAC region has recorded 8.5%
growth in the agent seats of contact centres in 2010. By 2017, the seats
are expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.5%.
Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery solutions are critical for a busy contact centre that can
not afford to have downtime. Severe conditions such as hurricanes, floods
and earthquakes constitute natural disasters. Technical disasters include
local or regional power outage and failure of local infrastructure.
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4. Most of the contact centres are not fully equipped in handling these
disasters. In case of emergencies and server failures, the cloud contact
centre can utilise a cloud based service provider as a backup. The contact
centre has to pay the cloud based provider a minimal monthly license fee
per employee backup. If something goes wrong, the calls are immediately
re-routed to these backup agents without a single point of failure. The
backup agents usually reside in a different location. This is generally less
expensive than leasing a shared space. With hosted solutions, the contact
centres can utilise the same incoming phone numbers of their customers
and provide an efficient transition. This helps the contact centres in
retaining the customers and their trust.
Efficient Dialing and Routing
The Asia-Pacific Cloud solutions offer various core technologies and capabilities such as
region had 2.2 automatic call distributor (ACD) with skills based routing, computer
million agent telephony integration (CTI) to facilitate integration with CRM systems and
seats in 2010. databases, Predictive Dialing and interactive voice response (IVR) with
The region speech recognition.
recorded 8.5%
growth in the With universal queuing capability, cloud ACD routes phone calls and chats
agent seats in made to the service number to the next available agent via a single queue,
2010. regardless of their location. It shortens the queue and the caller spends
less time in reaching an agent. Cloud ACD can route the contacts to the
appropriate agent based on contact type and agent’s skill sets. Priority
routing helps in prioritising the calls and chats from specific customers over
others. The calls of premium customers are immediately routed to the
available agent. This speeds the service by reducing the hold time.
The hosted predictive dialing is the best tool for outbound calling
campaigns. It connects agents to the calls answered by humans and not
voicemail or busy signal. This improves accuracy by predicting agent
availability and average length of the call. With predictive dialing solutions,
you can minimise the cost per lead and place up to three times more calls
in less time. They help in generating more profits by supporting profitable
telemarketing campaigns. They can also fill sales pipelines through a
campaign targeted to thousands of customers in one manageable task. The
agents can gain more leads and maximise sales quotas.
The implicit call scripting allows the campaign administrators to easily
define a set of agent questions and responses to meet sales expectations.
Agents can monitor their leads throughout the sales process from the lead
generation to the end of their life cycle.
With the integration of CRM system and other databases, the customers
can be identified the instant they call, by their profile menu. CTI helps in
providing the details such as past purchases and other activities of the
customer, enabling the agents to serve customers efficiently and quickly.
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5. APAC - Cloud The hosted IVR solutions address many of the concerns and challenges
contact centre associated with speech enabled IVR implementations. Users of various sizes
applications can find the solutions for all their needs. The solutions offer flexible pricing
market posted a models. Some are based on the cost per minute, others are based on
3.4% growth in success rates and some others on completed transactions. They handle
H1 2010. 45% to 75% of all the calls received by an inbound contact centre. This
reduces the work load of the agents and makes manager’s job easier and
customers happier.
Upgrade Benefits
Cloud contact The provider (hosting company) of cloud solutions takes the responsibility
centre market of of future upgrades. Technology management is done centrally and it is
the Asia-Pacific provided as part of the service. When the hosting company improves or
region set to upgrades the platform, the customers can get all those benefits without any
grow at a CAGR of additional charge. Providers are regularly improving their platforms by
15.4% till 2016. adding new functionality based on the feedback of customers. Rising
interest in cloud model has favoured the hosted contact centre market in
the APAC region. The cloud contact centre applications market posted a
3.4% growth in H1 2010. Research reports expect the cloud contact centre
market to grow at a CAGR of 15.4% till 2016.
Conclusion
Hence, cloud platform is poised to be a vital player in contact centres now
and in the predictable future. In its best form, it provides the means for
information technology to be dispensed to customers as a service. The
service offerings and products in the cloud model continue to grow every
year. While choosing a vendor that hosts contact centre technology in
cloud, we need to ensure the vendor’s ability to integrate with other
systems such as CRM systems and databases.
Having gone through this white paper, would you consider moving your
contact center to the Cloud?
The answer is obviously yes.
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