How to Win the Contact Center Battle with Cloud in 2022?

A Cloud Contact Center Solution is no longer another option for an on-premise setup. It stopped being a luxury option especially when the pandemic happened. Since then, businesses and contact centers have been trying to figure out how to streamline communications with a hybrid or a remote model. When I speak to other CX leaders or read their interviews, I recognize one primary concern in them. They are afraid that the cloud won’t give them the complete control that they had with an on-premise setup. While the fear is justified, it is high time we can win the contact center battle in the clouds!

This reminds me about an interesting mythological character in ancient India, called Meghnath (“Lord of clouds”) who could defeat the Gods by his immense magical power to fight and remain invisible behind the clouds. Now the battle in the clouds has re-emerged, obviously, this is just a metaphor.  

The Cloud Contact Center Solution market is growing exponentially and is expected to grow up to $20.19 billion in 2022. There are companies who are still recovering from the pandemic and will definitely restart with cloud contact center -solutions for obvious reasons. 

The Cloud Contact Center Solutions have been around for a while but their mass adoption is recent. It is a flexible cloud-hosted service that allows different contact center functionalities like call routing, omnichannel interaction, IVR, chatbots, and more. It can also help with non-customer-facing tasks like workforce management, generating operational insights, and optimization. These cloud servers are created in a multi-tenant structure with the managed database. This means, the data is secured and cannot be accessed by anyone but the owner of it, even if the server supports numerous tenants. 

Now, moving on to how a cloud contact center solution can support its projects better than any on-premise unit:

It is always easier to seek one-stop solutions. Diversifying your help or your vendors hinders your progress. Your information is stored at different places and maintenance will require different downtimes. Eventually, you have no synchronized control over your data and platforms. 

Cloud contact center solutions are one-stop halts for everything you need. And as it is on the cloud, the maintenance time is always negligible. Your team gets to have control over all your data without any interference. Omnichannel streamlines your communication by integrating all your channels (voice, video, messaging and social) under one platform. Here agents can access historical data and make better decisions. Your customer experience improves significantly as well. 

We are all aware of major outages that happen around Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. When Meta goes down, you lose access to Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram at once. It is a huge setback for many internet-based companies. Similarly, AWS has faced some serious outages. Since 2017 the cloud service giant faced multiple downtimes until December 15th, 2021. While they get fixed, it does a lot of damage to many businesses, especially souring the relationships between customers and brands. 
As we move ahead, it is smarter to use a multi-cloud or multi-geo architecture. It is where you distribute your cloud-based solutions across different environments or regions. This ensures that the impact of downtime is minimized when there is an outage. Outages will happen, hence, it is better to be prepared. 

Contact center owners come with all kinds of budgets. In this economy, a flexible growth module is very important for budget management. It is easier to invest in a pay-as-you-grow model. If you have to support only 25 agents for the next 3 months, then there is no need to pay for an annual plan. You can just pay for 25 agents on the month to monthly basis and upgrade your package as your business expands. This freedom is essential for businesses to grow as per their will without shedding money unnecessarily (otherwise getting locked). I mean, why pay for licenses that you may not need. A usage-based pricing model makes more sense. It is more fair and relevant in the economy that we are in today. Some of C-Zentrix products like voice bot or chatbot are available for pay per use model. You pay for whatever duration you have used it. 

I think people rarely understand the significance of hiring across the world. A contact center needs to support people across the world, customers who speak different languages and are not limited to English. This is when the cloud contact center solution is a significant help. As our company expands into the Latin American space, we need Spanish-speaking talent. It was easier to hire remotely and get them started remotely thanks to our cloud support. There was no need to relocate the agent or spend revenue on unnecessary aspects. 

What Changed? 

One might ask, why choose cloud now? Cloud has been around for a long time. Then why did we not recognize its value before the pandemic? It is probably because nobody likes change. It is how we were scared of steam engines and now we are traveling on the bullet train. Through the interviews of many CX leaders, I have learned that:

• Cloud enables higher returns over restricted investment. 
• There is a noticeable reduction in hardware and even office space/supporting staff. 
• There is a faster growth projection as all new updates are already enrolled in the process. There are no additional charges for improving solutions with upgrades which is a win-win for contact centers.
• Lastly, there is significant room for AI integration to improve customer experience by scale. 
• It is responsible for automation, generating insights, and improving agent work life as well. 

While these benefits always existed, people never wanted to move from the comfort of the on-premise. Business leaders got comfortable with the existing system and envisioned change as a loss of revenue (loss aversion). Once Ccovid made it a necessity to work remotely, the cloud contact center's solution became a necessity as well. This not only opened a box full of opportunities but sent the cloud contact center global market rocketing.

Cloud contact center solutions are offered with premium integration like voicebots, chatbots, and other solutions that are capable of using the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI). As the data harvesting field is also booming, cloud contact center solutions will become more and more relevant.

Learn more about cloud contact center solutions and best practices by speaking with our experts.