Cloud-based contact centre versus on-premise is a popular comparison that has made thousands of businesses to re-think the way their call centres operate. With growing customer demands, businesses now have to optimise their existing tech-infrastructures in order to deliver outstanding customer experience and survive in a competitive environment.
If you are currently using a traditional on-premise and have been considering moving to a cloud-based solution, let us take you through a journey where talk about what is a cloud-based contact centre and its features that benefit SMEs. We will also highlight the main differences between on-premise vs cloud contact centre technologies. Let’s get started.
What is a cloud-based contact centre?
A cloud-based contact centre is a call centre setup that is hosted over the internet (VoIP phone system). It is easily deployable with a minimum upfront cost. It’s a software solution that offers a comprehensive suite of tools and applications which allow you to deliver outstanding levels of customer service. In a cloud contact centre, all inbound and outbound calling operations are run over the internet and it provides uninterrupted customer service through all channels like Voice, Email, Chat, and Social Media.
Most companies go for a cloud contact centre to reduce their hardware setups cost and minimize the installation to go up and running in less time. But then there is much much more to it than just this.
Gamma has recently launched Horizon Contact, a cloud-based contact centre for small and medium-sized businesses.
Related article: What is a cloud contact centre? and how it’s beneficial for SMEs?
Benefits of Cloud contact centre
1. Reduced Costs
A cloud-based contact centre is more affordable for any-size business. The monthly or annual subscription costs associated with running a cloud-based deployment are generally much lower in terms of the cost of purchasing, installing, and maintaining.
2. Faster Implementation
Cloud-based contact centre solutions can be set up much faster since users will be accessing the software online. A quicker and smoother implementation means agents will be able to start making calls and having conversations across other digital channels sooner.
3. Higher Scalability
Cloud-based contact centres ensure higher scalability. If your contact centre starts growing rapidly or has a sudden increase in inbound call volume, additional seats can easily be added.
4. Greater Security
It turns out that your information may be safer when stored in a data centre managed by a cloud provider in compliance with national and global security standards and certifications.
5. Ease of Remote Working
Like many other benefits, remote working is another sought after benefit of a cloud-based contact centre. It is a go-to solution because of the flexibility it gives employees in terms of remote working.
6. Improved Customer Experiences
A good customer experience like a first call solution is something that most companies aspire in this time of instant messaging. Many cloud-based contact centre solutions support omnichannel, or at least multichannel experiences.
What is a traditional on-premise infrastructure?
Traditionally, call centres have been at the heart of customer service. It is primarily the place where customers interact with a brand on a human level by speaking to agents.
In call centres, phone support was the primary channel to interact with customers. But, in modern times, customer communication revolves around the emergence of chat apps, email, social media, and other new technologies. Thus, people have grown accustomed to having conversations over more than one channel.
An on-premise call centre provides communication hardware, operational infrastructure, and dedicated communication servers – all onsite. The traditional call centre is a hardware-based platform where customer service relies on tedious agent-centric labour.
A traditional call centre may have the best agents working for them, but they can’t overcome age-old on-premise infrastructure. Adding to the complexity is the cost of constant upgrades and maintenance of this infrastructure.
Cloud contact centre vs on-premise solution
Let us look at 5 primary ways by which a cloud-contact centre outshines an on-premise solution.
1. Cloud contact centre streamlines interactions
Firstly, a cloud-based contact centre allows you to create personalised voice conversations and speed up interactions. Attracting a customer’s attention with messaging in local dialects using pre-recorded voice capability or personalise the customer experience with individual data and details across different databases.
2. Less effort and greater customer satisfaction
Messaging reduces effort and improves customer satisfaction. Incorporating social media through a cloud-based contact centre provides cross-functional, asynchronous, and mobile-friendly channel. This reduces agent effort and increases communication efficiency, across any geo-location or targeted demographic.
Capitalize on targeted marketing by creating messages in any language, format, or length through programmable encoding to appeal to each demographic of your contact centre.
3. AI enables increased transparency
A cloud-based contact centre allows you to increase transparency through Conversational Artificial Intelligence. However, Platform capabilities like APIs and integrations ensure ease of deployment, scalability, and the ability to customise as per your business needs. But with API’s such as WhatsApp, today’s contact centres can share images and videos, files and documents, contact information, and locations to the right person at the right time, in real-time.
4. Improving First-time resolution
Chatbots can provide fast customer service in response to frequently asked questions. Also, can provide automated subscription content to bespoke communications. Thus, giving your agents more time to focus on complex queries. And transition into the conversation seamlessly when required, thus decreasing contact centre call-hold times.
5. Flexible working
Finally, give your agents to work flexibly, especially in this time of the pandemic. Unlike an on-premise solution, a cloud-based contact centre allows your business to move to remote working at any given time.
So, which one is better for my business?
With all benefits mentioned above, it is almost clear that a cloud-based contact centre might just be the right choice for your business. But, with so many complex elements to consider, the Contact Center deployment decision-making process itself can be a daunting task. Even when you’ve made the decision, you can feel a huge weight on your shoulders with a fear that critical pieces might have been overlooked.
We can help you with the right choice and then the transition. We will guide you in engaging all critical stakeholders across multiple business units and IT teams to understand the true requirements and priorities of both Cloud contact centre and on-premises solution. This will help you in making the right choice for your business. To learn more about the cloud contact centre, get in touch with us today. Alternately, for more information about Horizon contact, download the brochure.