How Can a Cloud Contact Centre Help You Successfully Navigate Economic Uncertainty?

What will keep your contact centre running smoothly, even when your agents must work-from-home and your customers have more questions than ever before? Keeping your organisation focused on remote service excellence, continuity and financial stability will have your customers — and your agents — as satisfied as ever.

In today’s challenging landscape, few of us are unaffected. As economic uncertainty looms, there is a growing need for contact centres to respond to near-term budget cuts and manage efficiency goals. But determining what to change, and how to implement new strategies, has contact centre leaders looking for answers.

As the future feels uncertain, it’s never been more important to focus on what you can control in your contact centre. And there’s plenty you can do to ensure satisfaction of both your agents and your customers. Explore the keys to business continuity and success, so your outbound or inbound contact centre can be resilient and adapt to the remote work environment with skill and speed.

Lay groundwork for business continuity

A cloud contact centre can keep service interruptions to a minimum in workplace and world transitions. Organisational leaders around the globe have seen direct impacts from the ever-changing Covid-19 landscape. But the organisations best positioned to weather the storm are those with strong business continuity/disaster recovery plans, and plans that include ways to smoothly transition from traditional to remote work environments.

Making a smooth transition to work-from-home comes down to having predetermined processes in place that can spring to life immediately in response to a pandemic, emergency or natural disaster. Contact centres can help businesses succeed as a result of having a smart scenario plan in place.

And with a cloud contact centre, agent connectivity won’t miss a beat. During the Covid-19 response, we’ve seen agents thrive while working-from-home with simple, low-cost laptops and headsets. With the cloud, you’ll be equipped to respond regardless of what the future holds.

Build customer confidence

How will your customers know they can depend on you? Testing, testing and more testing. Show your customers that your organisation is available and ready to help no matter what. Knowing your IVRS and ACD systems are prepared to answer their every call will help your customers gain certainty in a time of so much confusion.

And you’ll also build stakeholder confidence with a dynamic, elastic mindset. To continue serving customers and citizens in this ever-changing ecosystem, your contact centre needs software with two crucial capabilities — scalability and support for rapid changes to contact flows, IVR dialogs and other operational systems.

With leading software for contact centres, business leaders can ensure that availability is tested and proven. Keeping a close eye on your up-time statistics and quick resolution times will result in your customers sighing with relief. As you proceed with your plan of action, remember to take the time to build customer confidence and everyone will move forward with encouragement.

Restoring agent productivity

Although much has changed in the world at large, your contact centre’s goal remains the same: delivering support to those you serve. To weather economic uncertainty, organisation leaders can do their best to keep as many variables as possible the same. This sets the tone for “business as usual,” and invites your team to deliver on expectations.

Cloud contact centre software can act as an anchor of continuity. The continuity of technology from office to home (or in the face of any other economic uncertainty!) can promote feelings of normalcy and set the stage for an excellent customer experience, just like always. This can make all the difference in how your contact centre weathers the economic storms.

Cut costs strategically

As your organisation faces economic uncertainty, it makes sense to consider where costs can be cut. But evaluating what to trim first can be challenging. So, it’s wise to take a systematic approach based on the contact volume you’re experiencing.

Determine cost-cutting levers based on your contact center mode today. Whether you’re in growth mode, flat contact volume or shrinking volume, there are key cost-cutting measures you can take. A shift from on-premises contact centre software to the cloud can make economic sense no matter where you are.

Increase agility

In today’s unpredictable economic landscape, it’s more challenging than ever for organisations to predict what’s coming next. Will demand continue to surge up or down? How will your contact centre need to pivot as things evolve? This is why agility is so crucial to a thriving contact centre.

While purchasing servers in bulk may fill urgent needs, it leads to unnecessary excess and extra expense in the future. In order to have success in the long run, contact centres need to remain agile by utilizing cloud technology to increase capacity now and not be dragged down by excess in the future. Cloud contact centre technology can be deployed more quickly, and you can train team members with speed as well. Plus, you can quickly make changes to routing — in real-time, on the fly, without involving IT and without costly hardware shifts. Now more than ever, success relies pivoting and adapting swiftly; these features enable your contact centre to respond with agility.

Develop resilience

If we’ve learned anything from this pandemic experience, it’s that disaster is unpredictable. As organisations turn their attention to protecting the people who keep their company running, it’scritical to consider the technology that keeps everything up and available online. With on-premise servers, organisations face an increased risk of losing capabilities in case of disaster. This is why more and more business leaders are turning to the reliability of the cloud. No longer are servers tucked away in one location, in risk of being wiped out by one natural disaster. On the cloud, organisations are protected with servers in multiple regions and availability zones.

From data backups to cloud and more, it’s important to take stock of your company’s technological safety. Now is the time for contact centres to acknowledge the reality of disaster and prepare for whatever may be ahead. And resilience is just as useful in the best of times: when conditions improve and it’s time to ramp up, you’re ready.

How can your contact centre take advantage of cloud technology to find success in today’s rapidly changing landscape? Find out with the Contact Babel Inner Circle Guide to Cloud. In thiscomplimentary download, you’ll find a value-packed report on the industry’s latest analysis of cloud solutions in the contact centre. What are the security implications? How is cloud supporting remote work? Download the Inner Circle Guide to Cloud here to find out.

Additional resources: Watch our webinar to learn how to make the work-from-home contact centre work for your agents, customers and you with guest speaker Art Schoeller, Vice President and Principal Analyst with Forrester Research.