Looking up to today’s clouds: New contact center strategy

On last week’s webinar with Sheila McGee-Smith on “Time to Revisit Your Contact Center Decision”, she discussed how much cloud contact centers have evolved over the past four years. In 2011, there were approximately 400 thousand contact center seats in the cloud. Every year since then we’ve seen a steady 20% increase and expect to exceed two million contact center centers within the next few years.

Contact centers of the future

Customers used to select their contact center solution based on two simple questions:

1. What are your customer experience goals?
2. What systems do you need to tie into?

Fast forward four years, and we’ve seen so much has changed. There are now many more advanced features, pricing options, and capabilities that need to be taken into consideration. With so many advanced changes – and more additions almost every day – in today’s contact center market, it is time to ask yourself some new questions and rethink your contact center decision.

Maybe you need to replace a premise-based system and have reservations about cloud solutions. Or perhaps you are ready to look at what else the market may have to offer. Either way, now is the time to assess your organization’s readiness for change. Gather your marketing, operations, and IT chiefs to judge your needs and options.

Six questions to ask about your next contact center solution

Here are six questions to ask a few departments to determine if your company and your existing solution is ready for a new contact center strategy:

1. Does your current technology need to keep pace with rapidly changing customer behavior and expectations?
2. Do you provide customers with multiple interaction channels like SMS, apps, and voice?
3. Do you need to manage the customer experience across multiple geographic locations?
4. Is managing multiple campaigns and agent productivity important for reporting?
5. Do you want or need reporting, insights, and real-time visibility does each department?
6. Do you need to integrate with a CRM, customer database, or appointment scheduler?

If you answered yes to two or more of these questions, and your current content center strategy doesn’t provide what you’re looking for, it might be time to look into a new solution.