Staying Competitive with a Cloud Contact Center

The race to the cloud is heating up. And companies with legacy contact center solutions that needed to keep employees safe and working during the COVID-19 crisis only accelerated the push for cloud adoption.

Cloud allows companies of all sizes and verticals to provide personalized customer experiences, gain access to data and analytics that improve the customer journey, and enhance the employee experience. In fact, over the last few months, the use of cloud has increased to support remote working, especially in mid-sized and large contact center operations. In a recent Contact Babel research report about how contact centers use remote working solutions, on average, 22% of companies had no plans to implement a cloud solution.

Cloud Technology Personalizes Customer Experience

But cloud doesn’t just enable a remote workforce. It also empowers companies to better serve customers in more meaningful ways.

According to a recent Genesys research report, global consumers say customer service experiences have become more personalized while others say they haven’t reached their full potential. This means businesses have an opportunity to showcase their brand over their competitors.

Fewer than 21% of respondents said their customer service experiences have become “much more” personalized. Half of those surveyed (50%) say their experiences are only “somewhat more” personalized. And among US respondents, specifically, 70% believe customer service has become more personalized in the last five years; 29% see a “much more” personalized experience.

All these numbers mean there’s a lot of room for improvement in providing great customer experiences.

One thing holding companies back from providing that personalized customer experience is that they’re operating outdated technology stacks that are bolted together with disparate systems. An all-in-one cloud contact center solution enables companies to handle customer journeys and leverage data to better understand their customers.

Cloud technology gives customer service representatives the tools to understand customers’ preferred methods of communication — email, chat, phone, messaging, chatbots and voicebots. Customers can engage with your business — how and when they want.

Cloud Technology and Innovation in Your Contact Center

Enabling customer service representatives to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic alleviated some issues, but it also created new contact center challenges. Managing spikes in volume, automating tasks, securing customer and employee data, and providing a satisfying employee experience all required a modern contact center.

ATB Financial, a bank in Alberta, Canada, migrated an entire contact center infrastructure to the Genesys Cloud^TM solution in six months, replacing three legacy, on-premises systems. With cloud technology, it improved the customer experience and tapped into new analytics for agent productivity and workforce optimization. The bank was also able to map its customer journeys from end-to-end.

Other benefits of adopting a cloud contact center included:

• Seamless customer experience with multichannel capability
• Visibility into the full customer journey and ability to drill down into each interaction
• Flexibility to add new features and functionality easily
• 300% increase in submission of customer surveys

ATB Financial also wanted to empower agents through workforce optimization tools that allowed for multitasking. By adopting a cloud contact center platform, agents were equipped with the right tools, knowledge and processes — and an optimal work environment — to improve the overall customer experience.

For more information, check out the race to the cloud campaign and access educational resources on cloud adoption.