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Transformation of BPO Industry: The COVID Era

The COVID-19 pandemic acted as a catalyst in the revamping of the BPO sector. With an urgent need to move operations remote, we saw many traditional BPOs going through digital transformation.

At the start of the pandemic and its peak, things were looking bleak for the BPO industry so much so that a poll conducted by Deloitte in April 2020 showed that 32% of businesses believe the end of the pandemic will bring with it a reduction in outsourcing. However, things are starting to look up as we saw many players successfully adapting to this new normal.

“The Global Business Process Outsourcing Market will grow by $ 76.90 bn during 2020-2024”
Technavio

Impact of COVID 19 on the BPO Industry: Emerging Trends

> Work from Home is Here to Stay

Many BPOs had never even considered working from home prior to the pandemic. However, after experiencing it, on average, BPOs migrated 52% of their agents to a work-at-home model during the pandemic. This is based on a number of factors – better work-life balance, cost-saving, higher productivity, and more.

> Establishing Remote Governance

One of the major challenges of working remotely for a BPO is monitoring. Some of the common concerns are – do you trust the agent, do you trust the network or do you trust the device. Unlike an office setup, you cannot physically go and check. Thus, being able to identify gaps, evaluate and rectify the situation even while working remotely becomes an important factor.

> Data Security becomes more Important

Working from the office comes with its own security blanket – a secure network, data protection policies, and mechanisms. BPOs need robust internal IT support to help monitor and assist their remote workforce, as well as to implement secure work systems and protocols even when they are working remotely.

Remote Contact Center Solution: The Answer to your Contact Center Woes?

Well, any contact center is no stranger to using multiple systems to effectively manage its operations. However, things were different during the pandemic – people had to work from home. Many did not have the luxury to have access to similar (if not at par) infrastructure as they enjoyed while working from an office.

Being in this pickle made many businesses re-evaluate their call center software and look for a reliable and effective solution. Let us look at some of the ways that a Remote Contact Center Solution changed the CX game during these unprecedented times.

1. Work from Anywhere, Anytime

Overcome the challenges of remote working with a contact center software that allows your agents to work from their existing devices such as a smartphone or a laptop while maintaining data security. A truly effective call center software is the one that offers your agent the freedom to work from anywhere in the world, without compromising on their productivity or the customer experience.

2. Serving Customers on Multiple Channels

Engage with your customers and prospects on their favorite channel. With COVID restricting physical movement, we saw a significant increase in digital channels and more so on active channels like chat. An omnichannel contact center software powered by a unified agent desktop allows your agents to have contextual and qualified customer interactions.

3. Advanced Auto Dialers for Higher Call Connects

Let go of the age-old manual dialing and use auto dialer software to boost your call connect rate while improving agent productivity. With different auto-dialing modes available – predictive dialer, progressive dialer, power dialer, preview dialer, the contact center can optimize their outbound calling to significantly improve sales conversions.

4. Real-time Remote Monitoring

Tracking call center metrics are the backbone of any successfully run BPO. With remote working, the supervisors and managers cannot simply go on the floor and monitor the agents. Data has become more important than ever before. With live monitoring dashboards and scheduled reports, the supervisors can have a holistic as well as a granular view of agents’ login time, call volume, response time, customers in the queue, etc. This allows them to take corrective actions and ensure top-notch performance.

5. FCR with Configurable Routing Algorithms

With tensions running high, we saw customers becoming more and more anxious during the pandemic. That resulted in higher customer support queries and higher inbound call volume. Configure your routing algorithms to direct inbound calls to the right agent/department to ensure first contact resolution. For eg., routing the calls based on the product, language, region, etc.

6. Gamification to Boost Agent Motivation

Even though remote working has its perks but it also leads to a sense of isolation and can hamper agent morale. Gamification is a great way to engage your agents in healthy competition while doing away with siloes. Managers can gamify customer interactions, sales, performance, etc. However, care must be taken to ensure that things don’t become hyper-competitive and lead to unwanted results.

Closing Thoughts

The impact of Covid-19 in the BPO industry has been multi-faceted. However, companies that have been agile and ready to adapt to the ‘new normal’ have been able to survive the storm. From making several technological and digital changes to empowering their workforce with the right tools – changes had to be made continuously to ensure an optimal level of operations while working virtually. I think it’s safe to say that as long as the leaders and business heads are ready to unlearn and learn, the BPO industry will continue to grow in the post-COVID-era.

Types of Cloud Call Center Software: What Should You Choose

2020 ended the debate whether call centers should move to the cloud. With its inherent flexible features, cloud call center software saw a significant adoption in 2020. Sales, service, and collection departments have moved to remote work environments, paving the way for adopting cloud call center software at length. What led to cloud solutions’ tremendous growth can be simplified into three segments: Scalability, Security, and Integration Capabilities.

But, there’s no one size fits all cloud solution. There are three types of cloud call center software to meet the needs of different businesses. Depending on the business type and requirement, you can choose from the following:

Public Cloud Call Center

Public cloud is a highly cost-effective solution and is ideal for small and mid-size businesses in BPOs, E-commerce, Travel, and EdTech industries. In a public cloud, you share the same hardware, storage, and network devices with other organizations or “tenants.”

In the public cloud, you only pay for what you use. Here are some of the advantages of the public cloud:

Highly Scalable
Cost-effective
No maintenance required
High reliability

Private Cloud Call Center

Private cloud or internal cloud is ideal for businesses seeking high data security and control over business-critical operations. In banks and financial institutions, where data security is a prime concern, private clouds act as an on-premise solution without hardware installation. Dedicated instances for the banks can be created to meet specific IT requirements.

Private cloud advantages that make it a tick for businesses:

Offers greater scalability than on-premise solutions
It is a highly reliable and secure solution
Ensures a high level of data security and control over business operations

Hybrid Cloud Call Center

Hybrid cloud call center software is the best of both worlds because it combines private and public clouds that allow the data to move between the two environments. It eliminates the need to invest huge capital. For instance, if a business needs to handle a short-term spike in the business demand, hybrid functions are ideal cloud call center software.

The following advantages make the hybrid the choicest platform for businesses:

Allows the business to maintain private infrastructure for sensitive data while the other data or applications are handled on public cloud
Offers excellent flexibility to the business
It is a cost-effective solution with ensured scalability

Why should you have moved to the cloud call center software yesterday?

Research by Call Center Helper suggests that almost three-quarters of call center professionals (74.7%) believe that cloud better complements improved customer experience than on-premise systems.

So, help me guide you through the reason why cloud call center software is an ideal solution for your business:

Less Complexity, More Flexibility

With cloud call center software, you get the flexibility to upgrade your solution as the business requires. You do not have to worry about IT maintenance, hardware installation, and even set up a physical office space. 2020 has led us to believe that cloud is the way forward as most businesses see working remotely as a permanent solution.

Data Security

In a closely-knit world where information is transferred within microseconds, data theft becomes more sophisticated. But, with cloud call center software, you can be assured of a high level of data security and save your business from the data breach with its enterprise-grade security and adherence to regulatory compliance.

Integration Capabilities

Along with flexible upgrades, your business’ growth depends on the agility of the cloud call center solution agility. A flexible solution allows you to integrate with various applications like a ticketing system, knowledge base, in-house or third-party CRM seamlessly. Adding in-built or integrating new applications with a cloud call center solution will only take you a few clicks and your call center is ready to serve your organization and customers.

Faster Time to Market

You are running behind your competitor if you are still stuck with a complex solution that requires ages to complete the installation. Get yourself acquainted with a cloud software provider and implement your solution today. With a cloud call center solution, your business will be up and running in less than 48 hours, thanks to simple and quick installations.

Say No to Siloes

To deliver an extraordinary customer experience, you need to eliminate siloes. Help your call center agents drive the contextual conversation with the customers. Equip them with the right tools and information that they need to identify customers’ unresolved grievances, previous interaction history, and other details to deliver a customer experience that differentiates your brand from the competitors.

Cloud Call Center: The Way Forward

If your current call center software is making the job more rigid, it’s time that you choose a cloud call center solution that is highly scalable, secure, and reliable. To live up to customer’s demands, do away with the never-ending struggle of hardware installation and IT infrastructure maintenance. Get a cost-effective solution that fits perfectly for your remote call center operations.

(Before you settle for a cloud call center software, check out this quick checklist to decide on the right cloud call center software vendor.)

5 Metrics To Monitor A Modern Cloud Call Center Performance

“In God we trust, all others bring data.”
–W Edwards Deming

An inappropriate combination of metrics can be a reason for low productivity in your call center. As a call center manager, achieving goals for business, it is essential to clearly understand the call center metrics that are to be measured.

Let’s try to simplify the process of measuring cloud call center metrics with these easy to track metrics:

First Call Resolution (FCR)

Managers often evaluate their agents on metrics like average handling time. While AHT is a critical metric to track, it may give a false impression of the customer satisfaction rate. A call can be short, but the same customer can call back again within a few hours or minutes with the related problem.

If the customers are logging repeated queries, it reflects poorly on the customer experience. AHT does not necessarily explain the query resolution; therefore, a smarter option is to monitor first call resolution to evaluate each call’s success.

Service Level Agreement (SLA)

The number of calls handled within a specified time helps the manager track if the customers are responded to any escalation. This is not limited to the SLA management but also allows the managers to define the number of agents required to handle calls in a particular queue or campaign.

For instance, if the call flow in Q1 is higher than Q2, the manager can monitor that in real-time and shift the agents from Q2 to Q1 to handle the call surge and meet the SLAs without delay.

Customer Churn Rate

While managers are focused on tracking the agents’ performance, calculating the churn rate monthly, quarterly, or annually gives insights into the product performance. Along with product performance, it can be an indicator of the call center’s performance as customer service is a key factor in client retention.

Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/270362

For an e-commerce company, for instance, most customers are churned because of the poor after-sales service. By looking at the Customer Churn Rate, the manager can analyze the reason behind this while keeping the business standards in check and modifying their customer service strategy accordingly.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

There’s no denial of the fact that customer experience is directly related to customer satisfaction. For any organization, measuring the success of its brand comes from a higher customer satisfaction score. So, how do brands measure customer satisfaction?

It’s very simple. Simply monitor the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) by collecting their feedback. In this virtual reality, an effective IVR system allows the customer to punch in their feedback, which can then be analyzed by the managers.

Conversion Rate through Self Service Channels

Brands have started to realize the importance of self-service channels like IVR, but it’s essential to measure their effectiveness. The managers can analyze the number of customers who have found the answers to their queries and happily ended their journey with self-service IVR. If many customers are deflecting to calling customer service agents after tiring themselves with the IVR, it can indicate unresolved grievances, thus leading to low customer satisfaction. If this pattern is observed, it’s important to revise the IVR menu and identify why customers are still seeking human intervention.

The channel is only useful if the call volume for routine queries can be transferred to IVR while agents are busy resolving critical issues.

Concluding Thoughts

Measuring these metrics can be helpful to identify the reasons for low productivity. While these metrics provide a high level of insights into the cloud call center’s effectiveness, it is also recommended to deploy a cloud call center solution with other capabilities like live monitoring, extensive reporting, and dashboards. This will allow the call center manager to keep track of SLA breaches, customer satisfaction rate, and agent productivity.

What Makes Ameyo The Most Mobile Friendly Contact Center

The COVID-19 pandemic turned the world on its head. We saw things and circumstances changing, with call centers being no exception. They had to adapt quickly from being practically 100% on-premise to going for a remote contact center. Something that was seen as a reaction to the pandemic has turned out to be something that is here to stay – remote working looks like the future.

“Almost 50% of employees will continue to work remotely post COVID-19.“
Gartner

However, contact centers have moved from a system dependent model to an app or mobile contact center during the pandemic – and rightly so. Let us look at some of the reasons for this shift.

Mobile-based Contact Center – Is it Just Hype?

Since the launch of many COVID-19 vaccines made available across the world, many are calling it the start of the end of the pandemic and life returning to as it was before everything hit the fan. However, much research reveals that even when the pandemic is over (or controlled), some businesses will still continue to work remotely – many having already announced permanent work from home.

“One in three call centers in India to switch permanently to WFH”
Business Insider

If we look at such numbers, then it’s safe to say – work from home is here to stay. And that requires the best tools and systems to ensure top-notch performance. Mobile Contact Center Solution offers just that – while overcoming the many challenges of a virtual workforce.

Let us look at some of the benefits of mobile contact centers that have tipped the scales in their favor.

> The Business Should Never Stop

Whether your agents and supervisors are working from the office or home, it is essential to maintain business. Mobile-based contact centers have allowed the contact centers to ensure business continuity without having to depend on heavy infrastructure. Having a contact center on mobile provides the ultimate freedom to work from anywhere, anytime – without hampering agent productivity or customer satisfaction.

> Data on the Go

For contact centers having access to data, monitoring it is of great importance. And just because you are not chained to your computer should not come in the way of effectively managing your contact center performance. The ability to track contact center metrics on your mobile device is one of the biggest advantages of having a mobile app-based contact center.

> No More Infrastructure Worries

One of the biggest concerns of agents working from home is providing them with equivalent infrastructure as they were using in the office. Since the agents can now perform almost all the functions from their mobile phone, that takes a huge burden off.

> No Compromise on Customer Service

Awesome customer experience is at the heart of the success of a brand and the kind of customer support/service that a brand offers can make or break this relationship. Thus, it becomes imperative to maintain high customer satisfaction – irrespective of the location of the agents.

10,000+ Downloads – Agents Love Ameyo’s Mobile Contact Center Application

When the world was in chaos and businesses were struggling to stay afloat, Ameyo recognized the need for a contact center solution that provides people with the mobility to work from anywhere, without the constraints of a laptop or desktop system. And thus, India’s First Mobile Contact Center Solution came into existence.

Continuing with our motto of creating the most memorable and happy CX memories, we set on a mission to deliver just that – pandemic or no pandemic.

50,000+ Agents got Remote Ready with Ameyo

Let’s look at some of the reasons why contact center agents and managers love Ameyo’s Mobile-based Contact Center.

✓ Full-fledged Contact Center in the Palm of your Hands

Ameyo’s mobile-first solution offers an enterprise-grade, feature-rich contact center on your smartphone. Receiving inbound calls, automated outbound dialers, click-to-dial, call disposition, WebRTC, CTI integrations, and more – name it and you got it.

✓ Multi-level Data Security

We understand the importance of protecting customer information. Enjoy complete data security with advanced features like IMEI Whitelisting, blocking call recording, and the ability to take screenshots along with secure VPN support. All this while comply with your industry and regulatory requirements.

✓ An Easy-to-use Interface to Improve Agent Productivity

With features like a floating widget allowing your agents to have quick access to call or customer-related information even when they are on a different app goes a long way in making their lives easier. At the same time, the click-to-call functionality further makes things simpler as the agents can dial a call with just a simple click.

✓ Never lose Sight of Contact Center Performance

Allow supervisors and managers to view important call center KPIs with campaign level dashboard/dashlets. As the agents are also performing post-call activities (dispositions, notes, etc) using the mobile application itself, the supervisors can track the same and use this information to further optimize operations.

The Competitive Landscape

While Ameyo’s Mobile friendly contact center was the first mobile call center at the time and gained significant ground, we are now seeing other players trying to follow suit. However, the numbers speak for themselves – they still have a long way to go.

EdTech: A Unique Challenge for Contact Centers to Win & Retain Customers

The tides are changing in EdTech, inviting a massive adoption of online education across countries. The multitude of challenges exposed the need to create a system that brings continuity in education during and post-pandemic. This wave of change is attracting big money from investors as millions of students are moving towards online courses.

From an estimated size of $700 million today, the edtech market in India (that includes higher education, professional skilling courses, and, of course, primary education) is headed for an eight to tenfold growth in the next five years, says a Business World report.

The demand for EdTech is skyrocketing to supplement the traditional educational system. Unicorns like Byju’s, Vedantu, and Unacademy are changing the way education is imparted in India. EdTechs in India have been flourishing even before the pandemic but the COVID-19 breakout and the announcement of the National Education Policy, 2020 (NEP) are perfectly aligned to fuel the education market in the country.

With the ever-growing EdTech market, there’s a constant need to provide an enriched student and parent experience. The increase in enrollment for online classes raises the need for a contact center software solution in education sector that enables the EdTechs to speed up their Sales and Customer Service processes.

Challenges for Customer Experience in EdTechs

Lack of remote-ready infrastructure
Low agent productivity
Higher response time
Poor connect rate
Lack of live monitoring

How does an Effective Contact Center Solution help?

Now that the education sector is being reimagined completely, there’s a need to change the contact center sales and customer service practices.

Byju Raveendran (Founder & CEO, BYJU’S) said, “We want to ensure that all children get an equal opportunity to learn and are committed to empowering children across the country through our tech-enabled learning programs.”

1. Remote-ready Infrastructure

Most businesses are adopting ‘work from anywhere’ as a permanent solution, thanks to the pandemic. This wide range of flexibility of logging in from any device, any browser, and any location, has increased remote agents’ efficiency. Work from anywhere ready solution provides the flexibility to log in using mobile devices, laptops, or desktops, eliminating the infrastructural challenges.

Now, using remote contact center solutions, agents are able to provide exceptional customer service and sell more courses to students and parents from the comfort of their homes.

2. Increase in Agent Productivity with Automated Dialing

Manual dialing only allows the agents to talk to the customers/prospects for only about 40-45 minutes a day which results in low productivity. When stakes are high, automated dialing comes to the rescue to ensure that the agents are not faced with mundane tasks of manual dialing, landing a wrong number, or are answered by an answering machine. A smart dialer for outbound calls automatically increases the talk time from 45 minutes a day to 3 hours a day, resulting in more sales conversions.

3. Reduce Average Response Time

The higher the response time, the more the customer gets aggravated.

While resolving customer queries, it’s important to understand the context to refrain from asking the same questions repeatedly. If a student has a critical query regarding a course, the agents should be able to respond to the query faster to avoid SLA breaches.

A tight CRM integration with a remote contact center solution allows the agents to retrieve student’s information, their previous interaction history, and unresolved grievances. This enables the agents to quickly understand their queries, prioritize them, and help them find the best solutions immediately.

4. Live Monitoring for Supervisors

It’s no longer possible for supervisors to take a quick glance on the floor and monitor agents’ activities while working remotely. With live monitoring tools, supervisors can jump in a live call and monitor it to understand if the agents are able to qualify the leads and provide the right solution.

Supervisors can also keep track of login hours, average handling time, language proficiency, customer satisfaction rate, etc. so that the business standards are maintained.

5. Smart Call Routing Algorithm

To achieve a higher First Call Resolution (FCR) rate, route the calls to best-suited agents on the basis of preset routing parameters.

In the education sector, for instance, language-wise segregation can be helpful. If a call from Assam has landed, an agent with high language proficiency will handle the call to provide a native customer experience. This increases the customer satisfaction rate and helps in quick query resolution.

6. Priority-based Dialing

In a call center environment, where thousands of calls are landing each minute, defining the priority helps qualify leads that have a higher potential for conversion.

If a customer has inquired about a free course, the priority can be set as P3 whereas if an existing customer/student is looking to upgrade the existing plan, the priority can be set as P2. And if the student has shown the intent for upfront enrollment, the priority can be defined as P1.

7. Comprehensive Reports

To track and analyze call center metrics such as campaign performance, call abandonment rate, conversion rate, call disposition, agent productivity, detailed reports can be generated and shared with the right stakeholders to analyze and make well-informed decisions.

For instance, when an agent is interacting with the students or their parents on a video chat, the supervisor gets the report against each call or chat and they can quickly filter the interactions based on different call dispositions. These reports help the supervisor track the agent’s performance and analyze channel performance.

It is observed that video chat interactions have a higher conversion rate than a normal voice call interaction. Both parents and students are looking for a lively human to human interaction. The supervisor, while looking at these reports can establish the performance of each channel and then leverage it for their future campaigns.

In a Nutshell

While the world still battles the COVID-19 pandemic, EdTechs are emerging as a growth opportunity for startups and investors. According to a Business Insider report, 2020 saw India’s edtech startups raise over $2.2 billion in funding, with BYJU’S alone accounting for $1.35 billion. In the decade ahead, the country is set to put the best foot forward with EdTech companies gaining the biggest market share.

With this growth opportunity, EdTechs will continue to adopt the remote contact center solution for education to provide exceptional parent and student experiences.

Cloud Contact Center Best Practices in 2021

A glance back at the past few months when COVID-19 pushed the businesses ahead of its time and shifted all business operations to a remote work environment. It has ‘work from anywhere’ more acceptable and how companies can see this as an opportunity. Contact center leaders had to rewrite the rulebook for customer experience strategies. The pandemic and its impacts have gone to a length, demanding businesses to be more agile and nimble-footed than ever.

With the emergence of remote work, self-service, and higher customer expectations, most businesses are looking for solutions to enrich customer and agent experience. To help you future-proof your contact center, you need the cloud contact center best practices that will help you increase operational efficiency, reduce the cost of operations, and improve customer satisfaction at large.

It’s time that you exceed customer expectations and give them what they deserve.

Provide an Omnichannel Customer Experience

Using a robust cloud contact center solution, you can serve your customers on their preferred communication channels. Most customers like to communicate with the brands just the way they communicate with their family and friends. Let not the customer struggle to reach you.

Being easily accessible through email, voice call, video call, chat, and social media platforms is a tried and tested way to keep your customers engaged with your brands throughout their customer journey.

Create a Remote Work Environment

The pandemic has skyrocketed the need to have a virtual work environment for most businesses. But, as it comes, this has become the best practice for companies to provide their employees/agents with the flexibility to log in from any device, any browser, and any location.

Expected or unexpected, contact center leaders are preparing for an unprecedented crisis. Cloud contact center solutions offer great flexibility and scalability to businesses without having to worry about operational overheads.

Sachin Bhatia, Co-founder at Ameyo, believes that the early adopters of remote contact center solutions will have an added advantage of streamlining and strategizing their business processes.

Let Customers Self Serve

During the pandemic, hold times have skyrocketed to as much as 34%, says a Harvard Business Review.

That said, we know by now that the customers are not willing to be put on hold for their queries. You get the best of both worlds by allowing the customers to navigate through self-service IVR, knowledge base, FAQs, and automated chatbot, ensuring that they find answers to routine questions, freeing up the contact center agents to give undivided attention to critical queries.

Self-service options help the customers find relevant information quickly without demanding an agent to be available to take the call. The dominance of the voice channel will continue to be felt in the contact center industry but a perfect blend of self-service options with the right balance of human intervention can save you from the trouble of putting customers on hold.

Data Security

Data security has been one of the top concerns for both contact center leaders and customers. While this is not a new trend in demand, businesses have started to realize the importance of data security to prepare for the decade ahead.

With effective cloud contact center software, provide your customers with peace of mind, ensuring that their data is in safe hands.

Emergence of Voicebots and Chatbots

After sailing through what is now termed as the ‘new normal,’ businesses have found their inclination towards voice bots and chatbots. Due to the sudden surge in call volume, chatbots have been rescuing the contact center agents from routine queries. To facilitate faster interactions with the customers, businesses have successfully diverted simple queries to the bots, providing the answers that the customers have been looking for.

This has set a new benchmark for contact centers, surpassing the pre-COVID customer expectations, resulting in a higher customer satisfaction rate.

On-premise Vs Cloud Contact Center: How to Make the Right Choice

When an organization decides to set up its contact center, one of the most important (if not the most important) considerations is to decide whether to go for an on-premise contact center solution or a cloud-based solution. With so much conflicting information available today (thank you internet), making this decision can be tricky.

Today, let us try to simplify matters and discuss everything there is to know about both cloud contact center and on-premise contact center solution.

First things first… The Definitions

What is an On-Premise Contact Center?

On-premise contact centers are the traditional contact center setup wherein all the hardware and other physical equipment and servers, etc are stored at the company’s location. In the case of an on-premise deployment, the onus of maintaining the systems relies on the company. This might require them to set up a specialized team also.

What is Cloud Contact Center?

A cloud contact center is the opposite of an on-premise situation. Here, the organization does not have to invest heavily in the physical infrastructure. This solution only requires internet access with sufficient bandwidth for virtual agents to comfortably manage inbound and outbound calls.

Differentiating between On-premise and Cloud-based Contact Center

Businesses often compare how cloud contact center works and on-premise contact center on certain parameters. Let us look at them in some detail.

Time to Market

Time to market essentially means the time it takes to go live with your contact center. Since, an on-premise contact center requires the company to purchase hardware and shortlist a location to put in their servers, etc the time to get started is longer. On the other hand, it is much shorter in the case of cloud contact center solution where you only need the application and internet connection.

Cost

When thinking about the cost of contact center, it all comes down to whether you are looking for capital expenditures or operating costs. For on-premise deployment, you are looking at upfront costs for the space to put your servers, hardware, licenses, etc. And for cloud, you have an ongoing monthly subscription cost along with the cost of internet and agent device.

Scalability

You might need to physically upscale or downscale in an on-premise setup as opposed to a couple of clicks and tweakings for a cloud contact center solution. This makes a cloud setup a lot more flexible and scalable according to the business needs – compared to an on-premise solution.

Reliability

The on-premise contact center should provide more stability in terms of call lag and call quality. However, the quality will only be as good as the contact center technology that you are using. Similarly, for cloud contact centers, the call quality is dependent on how strong and stable is your internet connection.

Business Continuity

With so much hardware involved in an on-premise startup, it can cause an issue when a disaster hits. It takes a lot longer to physically switch servers and get back up and running. However, the down-time is significantly less in the case of a cloud-based contact center solution.

Now that we have seen the difference between the cloud contact center and on-premise contact center, let us discuss some of the benefits for both of the deployment options.

Advantages of Cloud Contact Center Software

Some of the benefits of a cloud-based contact center are listed below:

Cost-benefit and thus, higher ROI
Pay only for what you use
Increase or decrease operations without much effort
Fast deployment

Advantages of On-premise Contact Center Software

If you are looking for an on-premise contact center solution then you should definitely consider the following benefits:

Upfront cost
More control over your functions
In-house storage of data
Complete ownership of hardware and maintenance

Choosing the Best Contact Center Software

Investing in contact center technology is a big decision. You might think something but it might be completely different when you use that software. We have listed down the advantages and differences for both on-premise and cloud contact center solution. However, it never hurts to get a demo of the solution to get a better understanding of what you are getting yourself into and more importantly get a hand’s on experience.

Now that you are armed with information about both sides of the contact center coin – cloud and on-premise, hopefully, you will be able to make the right choice for your business.

Explore the key features of cloud contact center and make the right choice for your business.

Top 5 Cloud Contact Center Trends To Watch in 2021

2020 has set the stage for tremendous growth in the adoption of cloud contact centers for the years to come. In the changing times, contact centers are transitioning to a cloud contact center model that is agile, highly scalable & flexible, and cost-effective. The recent cloud contact center trends state that businesses can achieve more in less by investing in cloud contact center software.

With the changing trends and aggressive move to cloud infrastructures, Forrester Research indicates that the global public cloud infrastructure market will reach US$120 at an annual growth rate of 35%, as the cloud continues to take center stage in the recovery from the pandemic.

Now that the cloud contact centers have started to substitute on-premise contact centers, here’s a list of cloud contact center trends that the brands should watch out for in 2021.

1. Increased Adoption of Omnichannel Cloud-based Contact Centers

The omnichannel contact center is not new for the industry but this becomes a differentiating factor for the businesses converting their brands into experience hubs. With an omnichannel cloud-based contact center, brands can deliver a unified customer interaction experience across multiple platforms.

A fully integrated omnichannel offering is the future of cloud contact centers that will help the businesses surpass customer’s ever-evolving expectations. With a pool of channels like email, voice, video chat, social media, in-app chat, etc., your brand will be able to deliver differentiated customer experiences in 2021.

For instance, more and more businesses are turning to Google’s Business Messages to convert prospects faster using Google Search & Maps, while shortening the customer journey.

2. Adoption of Cloud-based Video Contact Center

With an increase in the demand for a face to face interaction during the pandemic, it has led businesses to rethink their customer engagement strategy. Video contact center software solves customer problems faster and helps drive customer trust with humanlike interactions.

A video contact center software is win-win for businesses as it enables them to:

Reduce cost by replacing physical meetings with video interactions
Increase first call resolution (FCR) and NPS
Increase efficiency with quality monitoring & analytics
Win customers trust by humanizing the contact center

3. Bot is the New Normal

The new normal is interacting with the customers when and where they want to be served, demanding from the businesses to become proactive and provide customer support 24*7. Today, with months into the pandemic, the inbound call volume and the wait time is continuously increasing, and it requires the brands to rethink their customer engagement strategy.

The introduction of voice bot and chatbot, at large, is one of the most embraced cloud contact center trends that the businesses are leveraging to resolve customer queries without human intervention, thus, increasing first contact resolution.

A smooth deflection from bot to agent ensures that the customers are not left hanging in the loop and are provided with the information they need. For instance, if a customer has a simpler query like checking the delivery status of their product, a chatbot or voice bot can efficiently respond to the query while the agents will focus on more complex queries.

4. Rise of Remote Contact Center Workforce

What was once a luxury only a few could afford has now become the new normal. Thanks to COVID-19 that the businesses are anticipating the need for hiring a remote workforce. Cloud contact center software has made it possible for businesses to think of hiring a remote workforce across the globe without having to invest in any physical infrastructure.

Hiring a diverse workforce has manifold benefits such as providing a native experience to the customers, hiring agents from a large talent pool, hiring seasonal employees to cater to the ongoing needs of the business without having to put in the capital for infrastructural readiness.

5. More Focus on Savings

Uncertainty is one of the key lessons that 2020 has taught every business and professional. In the coming year, we expect more focus on solutions with a focus on saving and efficiency. Now that most of the businesses are planning to go remote, one of the emerging trends that we have seen is the cost reduction in contact center operations. iMarque, a Chennai based BPO, reduced its cost of operations by 15% using Ameyo’s remote contact center solution.

Additionally, with cloud contact center software, you can now keep track of agents’ activities, campaign performance, first contact resolution rate, CSAT rate, etc. with a holistic remote monitoring dashboard. Now identify reasons for low productivity using 15+ parameters such as low internet bandwidth and unsupportive device to analyze the efficiency of each agent.

For instance, if a set of agents are finding difficulty in interacting with customers due to poor internet connection, the supervisor can route all the calls to other agents in real-time, ensuring that the customer experience is not compromised.

Ameyo’s Voice Updates: Enhancing User Experience for Admins and Supervisors

Businesses are trying to simplify customers’ journeys with advanced features, to offer precise solutions to each unique customer/prospect, and pitch in the right solution as per their requirements. While building an exceptional customer experience is important, it is undeniably true that businesses need to start solving user experience issues for the admins and supervisors.

To ensure that your supervisors and admins have the right feature set, you need to choose an advanced call center software that guides you ahead of the competition. To minimize the manual tasks, you can now access these upgraded features that you shouldn’t miss.

Lead status based grouping

To prioritize the dialing strategy better, the supervisors should be able to filter the leads based on the lead status. Based on active/inactive leads, the supervisor can now manage the leads better and take a holistic view of all leads in one glance.

This helps the supervisor keep track of inactive leads and plan action or define priority for better conversion. For instance, if a manager in an insurance company wants to reach out to his active customers for a new policy, they can filter the lead list of contacts based on its active/inactive status for the past three months and smartly dialing strategy for it.

Churn contacts based on filter groups

Supervisors/admin can fetch data to track existing filter groups, create new filter groups under the existing ones, and segment the data based on specific parameters, improving the lead quality.

After filtering the data, the unimportant data can be churned, and the exact dialable count can be tracked with ease. This feature enhances the lead quality, allowing the agents to reach out to the customers/prospects with a high chance of a conversion. For instance, the supervisor creates filter A based on the following parameters:

Invalid numbers
No response for three months

With this filter, the supervisors will churn the resultant data. They will inform the agents to sell the credit cards only to people meeting the set criteria, leading to a higher conversion rate.

Know exact count of dialable contacts

It’s always better to have clear insights into dialable data, defining and modifying sales and marketing strategies for businesses. Consider an example where a healthcare insurance company wants to offer a policy to the customers/prospects with a salary greater than 60K and between 25 to 35 years. The call center software will allow the admins to create filters based on these two conditions and fetch the exact dialable count using filter groups.

With this filtered data, the admin can define an effective strategy to set different algorithms to dial out these contacts.

Set priority for each filter group

This feature is very effective for the brands dealing with a large chunk of data. Let’s try to understand this, considering an example of a BPO where the data is to be segmented on various factors. The admin has to create multiple filter groups, meeting the business requirements.

In an ABC BPO, the admin has created filter groups for pitching car loans for people earning between 40K-80K and are aged between 30-40years. The admin can now create two filters under a group filter for people salaried 40K-60K (Filter 1) and 60K-80K (Filter 2). After creating these filter groups, the admin can set the priority based dialing. The admin can further set the priority as P1 for Filter 1 and P2 for Filter 2 to ensure that they are dialing the customers/prospects with a higher possibility of converting.

Prioritizing calls based on filters will help the businesses get more refined data that increase their conversion rate.

Keep track of filter group performance in real-time

The supervisors can keep track of filter group performance in real-time to have clear and more informed insights into dialed contacts. If a supervisor wants to track a particular customer/prospect’s status, they can search for such details using a unique ID, and the related data will populate. In this data, the supervisors can analyze the filter group that the contact belongs to and its position in the sales cycle.

Based on this factor, the supervisors can further segregate the data. Let’s consider an example where the supervisors want to filter the data for contacts with the disposition of “callback” across various filter groups and create another group to be dialed out.

This ensures that the supervisor can manage the contacts effectively.

Must-Have Features of Best Cloud Call Center Software

There are many definitions of cloud contact center available and today we also define it. A cloud call center is defined as a system to handle customer calls and interactions over the internet. In a cloud setup, the call center agents can work from anywhere in the world, without the restriction of working from their office.

There are a number of cloud call center vendors available in the market today – too much competition. But the question remains – how to choose the best cloud call center solution for your business? In this article, we will briefly discuss the critical cloud contact center features that can make or break the decision.

Flexibility and Scalability

Cloud contact center has to be flexible and scalable. What this essentially means is that as per your business requirements, you should easily be able to add or reduce agents without having to invest heavily in the infrastructure. While looking for a good cloud call center vendor it is important to look into the kind of customer support that they can offer. You do not want to be stuck in a situation where you are facing high call volume and are in the need to expand your agents but the vendor is taking too long. This reflects poorly on your brand image and more importantly the experience of the customer.

Integrations

One cannot emphasize enough how important an integrated call center software as call centers tend to use multiple software systems. A cloud call center solution that offers out of the box plugins to integrate with leading business tools such as CRMs, ticketing systems, and/or other third-party systems is the one that you should opt for. This one-click integration will go a long way in not just improving your customer experience but also reducing data redundancy. With all the systems working in sync, the callcenter agents will be able to have more qualified and enriching customer interactions. While the supervisors and managers will be able easily able to monitor the performance and make data-driven decisions.

Real-time Remote Monitoring

One of the biggest benefits of cloud call center software is the ability to work from anywhere, anytime. However, while the agents are working from remote locations, the supervisors also need to track their performance and monitor overall operations as well. This requires a solution that allows call center managers to:

Establish IT Governance: Identify any gaps in the health of agents’ device to know if the agent’s device is working properly using the device management report and rectify the issue.
Call Quality Monitoring: The supervisor can barge, snoop, confer, and takeover a call to ensure conversation quality standards are being met.
Agent Performance Tracking: Monitor available agents, number of calls being handled by the agents, wait time, number of customers in the queue, etc. to make effective decisions.

Omnichannel Communication

Even though buying a cloud call center is way more cost-effective than an on-premise call center setup, it is still an investment, and who does not want to maximize their ROI. Thus, while choosing a cloud call centre solution, go for the one that has the provision to add communication channels. You might start off with say, only call, email, and chat but might need to add WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, or Google’s business messages in the future as your customer base grows and you look to serve them on their most preferred channel. So, having an omnichannel call center software or one that has the option of adding new channels is your best best for a futuristic technology partner.

Team Collaboration

Since the agents are working virtually instead of working out of an office, team collaboration becomes more important. Look for a cloud call center solution that offers team collaboration tools as an internal chat among agents and supervisors, message broadcasting by the supervisor, knowledge base, or an internal portal to encourage tribe learning – wherein more experienced employees can help newer ones. Additionally, having onboarding training can also be helpful in getting everyone on the same page, especially new hires.

Choosing the Best Cloud Call Center Software

The competition is stiff when it comes to different cloud call center solutions available in the market. Enterprises need to be careful while making the purchasing decision. After all, cloud-based call center software has the potential to take your customer experience to new heights.

Businesses need an agile solution, backed by the support of a great technology vendor that helps them to boost performance, provide omnichannel support and engagement, real-time dashboards, and comprehensive analytics to successfully support customers and build a strong base of loyal customers.