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Criticised for their inflexibility, customer contact centres are being reborn in the cloud, where they can leverage flexible working practices and provide better customer experience.
For many organisations, the last decade’s move away from mono-channel, voice only customer contact to an approach which embraces new channels such as online chat, email and even social media has posed some significant challenges.
Should these disparate channels be managed by different parts of the business, or by a single department with operatives skilled in all? Are they more effectively housed in a single location, or do technical requirements keep them apart? How can a customer’s history and context be effectively shared across channels to provide a great customer experience?
Thankfully, cloud-based customer contact platforms are making these dilemmas a thing of the past.
Flexible business
The main benefit of a cloud-based support solution is the flexibility it offers staff, as they can dial in from an office network, home network or mobile phone. This effectively cuts the cords tying an operation to particular premises, freeing companies from the constraints of particular locations which support the specific connections they require.
The move also affords organisations more operational flexibility. As business requirements evolve – such as employing more staff to cover busy periods like end of financial year and subsequent downscaling – cloud solutions can readily scale as required without requiring additional infrastructure and resources.
These services can be turned on and off simply by adjusting features in an ongoing subscription – changing contact centres from a largely CapEx model to the more flexible OpEx.
This flexibility extends to staff, empowering workers to work from home using internet, mobile or even a traditional PSTN phone line and giving specialists more flexibility for ad-hoc engagement.
Informed engagement
Cloud platforms also make it easy to integrate new services and channels to traditional customer service interactions. Whereas businesses in the past may have communicated with their customers purely by telephone and email, modern systems allow a seamless transition to communication with the same customer base using newer technologies such as webchat, social media and mobile messaging.
By having a flexible, central system that can accommodate multiple channels, it becomes possible to deliver a much better experience to customers calling in, as their context and interaction history can be easily recalled and transferred between operators.
Modern cloud platforms, such as Genesys’ PureCloud, can be easily integrated with existing CRM such as SalesForce or Microsoft Dynamics, thanks to their APIs. As such, any customer-related data can simply be melded with the cloud platform to maintain smooth operation while boosting efficiency.
Operational efficiency, operator performance and customer experience can also be tracked via integrated analytics, which scale from a simple performance overview offering to KPIs which can be managed and measured on the ly.
Experienced migration
At Telstra, we’ve been a strategic partner of Genesys for 20 years in Australia, with significant experience deploying a cloud contact centres across a variety of industries.
A common fear of upgrading the software environment for an entrenched workforce like that associated with customer service agents is the expense and complexity around training and adoption.
However, Telstra and Genesys’ wealth of experience in this area has made the process as streamlined as possible and includes a full set of online training resources for all customers. The web-based software has been designed with simplicity of services in mind – it’s intuitive to use and features simple point-and- click user interfaces.
Additionally, the Genesys platform is being constantly improved. Customers can make use of these agile ‘centralised’ innovative upgrades without having to install local ‘forklift’ technology overhauls, suffer service interruption or require technical support.
Utilising Telstra’s global network and services in conjunction with Genesys’ microservices architecture via Amazon’s AWS platform as one end-to- end solution gives it robust scalability to allow you to grow and focus on your business.
