What to Look for in a Hosted Contact Center Solution
You’ve probably heard all the fancy acronyms – IVR, ACD, WFO, WFM, QM, CX – and more. And here is another acronym to throw at you: CCaaS, which stands for Contact Center as a Service. It’s another fancy term for Cloud or Hosted Contact Center. But the important question here is how do you know what to look for in a contact center solution, hosted/cloud or otherwise? We understand the alphabet soup can be overwhelming. It is safe to say that most of the top CCaaS providers today will offer most of the alphabet-soup features needed. Before getting that that, let us help make sense of narrowing down the process.
- Service Reliability & Uptime – No other metric is as important as reliability. If your contact center is down for even a minute, you could loose in a big way. Your contact center service provider of choice should have at least 99.99 percent reliability. There are even a few CCaaS providers that will financially guarantee 100% uptime. Unlike on-premise solutions, CCaaS solutions are run in geographically redundant data centers to dramatically improve dependability.
- Ease of Use, Admin Portal Access, Dashboard Simplicity – The best features in the world are useless if the agent ends up writing everything down on a piece of scrap paper. Which adds precious and unnecessary time to every interaction. Make sure the complex features of your potential contact center solution are still easy enough to learn and use.
- Provides a 360 Degree View of Your Customer – Your contact center solutions need to pull information about a customer from several sources and put that information in front of the agent, so the agent can better serve the customer. Knowing the customer’s past actions and present concerns will help predict their future needs.
- Customer Self Service Features and Automated Tasks – Let your agent do the important stuff, and let the routine, mundane tasks can be done for you. A good contact center Solution will make the most of your agent’s time through automation and self-service options.
- Security Measures – Today, information security is crucially important to any business. Arguably more so in a contact center environment with agents often collecting sensitive customer information. You need the proper amount of encryption and other security to keep your data safe. In addition, all financial and medical communications/data are tightly regulated. Be sure that your customers will feel safe giving private information to your agents.
It can be daunting to find the right solution and the right suppliers. Cloud 9 Advisers, together with our distributors, is made up of more than 250 total staff and nearly half of them include engineers, project managers, and experts in numerous technology disciplines and solely devoted to uncovering the right fit for our clients. Every company wants to be your “partner”. But let’s face it, if they are selling you something, they’re not your partner, they’re you vendor. Cloud 9 is different. We don’t actually sell anything. Consider us your virtual CIO, full-service technology broker, and trusted adviser. We are impartial, unbiased, and supplier-neutral. We sit on your side of the table to help you find, evaluate, and negotiate with service providers. Join us and get exclusive access to our portfolio of 200 vetted and prequalified suppliers. Plus, have our entire team at your disposal. We’ll help design the right solution, get pricing from multiple competing suppliers, and guide you through the evaluation and procurement process. Use our evaluation tools for documentation and due diligence. We’ll help you with everything before, during, and after implementation of your new services.
