Cloud Source

How a Cloud Contact Center Equips You for Digital Customer Service

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The cloud contact center helps you meet the demands of customer service associated with ecommerce.

The shift in customer behaviors from brick-and-mortar purchases to online shopping certainly didn’t begin in 2020, but the increase in demand around digital customer service has accelerated. As customers seek out solutions that are self-service, automated, and instant, a cloud contact center allows you to meet their expectations and create excellent customer experiences.

Customers are looking for more digital customer service options, and with a significant acceleration in digital transformation in companies over recent months, consumers are increasingly finding what they need in digital format. When a customer can’t turn to an associate just steps away within a store, they are looking for the digital equivalent, and a cloud contact center makes that possible. Here are some ways it equips your business for digital customer service:

Self Service: Customers would rather access self-serve options than be placed on hold for routine questions. Inquiries around delivery times, pricing, and return policies are just a few instances where self-service can be a good alternative solution. A cloud contact center can automate self-service options, bringing in an agent for more complex requests.

Some brands are capitalizing on the social aspect of brand identity by providing an interactive site where customers can access answers to specific questions from other shoppers. This facilitates consumers’ connection to the brand, and when a bot is introduced into an interactive site, they can assist with meeting customer needs alongside other customers.

Utilize AI: Artificial intelligence (AI) is another avenue for simplifying responses and addressing high call volume. AI chatbots can work as assistants to your agents within a cloud contact center, forwarding calls that require more involvement to an agent. The chatbot may provide order numbers, access to prior conversations, and contact information so that when the agent begins interacting with the customer, they have the appropriate context for the conversation.

The benefit of using a chatbot is that the agent is able to quickly resolve the customer request, offering a superior experience for the customer and a high level of efficiency for the contact center.

Prioritize Transparency: A cloud contact center equips your digital customer service strategy by boosting communication. For instance, nobody wants to wait on a call, but a welcome bot can clearly communicate anticipated wait time, allowing customers to make a decision about whether they want to wait or access another format to receive service. Customers may be thrilled to find out that the information they need is readily available through an automated option or SMS.

A cloud contact center can also offer the customer the option of being called back when it is their turn in the queue. By giving the customer choices in how they receive service, your agents also enjoy more positive interactions with customers that have had a voice in their experience.

If you’re ready to upgrade your contact center to accommodate digital customer service options, contact us at Cloud Source. We can help you evaluate your needs and leverage the best solution to provide your customers with excellent experiences with your brand.

Integrate Workstreams Through Collaboration and Communications

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Collaboration doesn’t work well on video conferencing; companies need a more comprehensive approach.

For many companies, the pandemic was a catalyst for prioritizing digital transformation, with investments in cloud solutions advancing to keep business processes in motion. Teams found ways to support collaboration through cloud communications, but it has often been found wanting.

The disconnect is that too many teams have attempted to simply move their same processes to the digital realm – without getting the full benefit of the tools available. In order to get the most mileage out of cloud technology, companies should be examining workstreams to gain maximum efficiency, cost savings, and productivity.

Collaboration Tools: Video conferencing is a great place to meet, but it is not effective for collaboration on its own. As teams view spreadsheets, product management schedules, or presentations in a video conferencing session, all goes well. But when it’s time to share documents or try to work with the most updated version of a spreadsheet, things can get complicated.

To truly collaborate in a digital setting, teams need integrated tools that allow for shared solutions to serve the team’s needs.

Communications: Communications is another area in which digital transformation sometimes falls short of actual transformation. There may be updated email and chat apps, but companies don’t take the harder step of examining their communications needs and integrating them for maximum effectiveness.

Consider a contact center in which agents are forced to toggle between chat, email, phone calls, and text to follow the progression of a customer’s unresolved issue. While they have all the tools to communicate in a variety of formats with the customer, there’s no cohesive quality to the communications stream. The customer is forced to wait while the agent pieces together their prior interactions with the company.

A comprehensive, integrated solution like contact center as a service (CCaaS) offers communications tools that seamlessly fit with other customer service solutions. Agents are able to view prior conversations, ask a question of the billing department, and retrieve past order information, all within a single, integrated solution. The customer receives better and faster service.

Unified communications as a service (UCaaS) is another technology with advanced tools that allow for shared workspaces and integrated communications. Teams are able to make decisions faster because they can even view the status of members to see if they can discuss options and move a project forward. With all communication occurring through a single, cloud-based app, the workstreams are significantly more efficient.

Education Leads the Way: An example from education helps illustrate the possibilities in collaboration and communications for businesses. When school became virtual-only in 2020, many teachers went far beyond simply video conferencing their regular teaching approach. While video was a useful technology, they employed more insightful solutions to create a highly engaged virtual classroom environment.

Teachers created immersive experiences for their students using virtual classrooms with presentation-sharing options, real-time chat, and user-friendly tools. Students were able to collaborate in their virtual classrooms, accessing shared tools and interacting with one another.

In order to make the most of emerging collaboration and communications technology, teams should drill down to business processes for improved workstreams. Contact us at Cloud Source for help in getting started with these truly disruptive solutions.

How CCaaS and the Customer Experience Are Driving One Another Forward

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CCaaS is able to expand the customer experience far beyond on-premise communications solutions.

You might think that it was the sudden shift to remote work in 2020 that drove a surge in implementation of contact center as a service (CCaaS), and it is partly true. But even before COVID-19 made its appearance, the pursuit of the ideal customer experience was making CCaaS a priority for companies.

Those organizations that were already utilizing CCaaS were better positioned to pivot to remote work, but it’s likely that the same commitment to customers that made CCaaS a priority also made them ready to create superior customer experiences and survive turbulent times. In other words, it wasn’t just the technology that made them resilient, but the customer-focused philosophy behind it. Here are three ways in which CCaaS and the customer experience are driving one another:

Customers Want Flexibility: In a world where communication is happening more and more over text and chat, customers want to be able to interact with companies in these formats. Rather than sit with a phone attached to their ear, waiting for their turn in the queue, customers can get an easy response to their questions with a chatbot. For more in-depth questions, a customer service agent can be reached through an email or instant message.

On-premise, legacy communications tools are limited in these functions, forcing companies to either relinquish customers to more technology-forward competitors or patch together apps to try to accommodate the communication formats their customers want.

Agents Want Rewarding Jobs: Happy contact center agents result in better customer experiences. When the technology is there to relieve contact center agents from more mundane tasks, such as providing delivery updates or answering simple questions, they are able to engage more fully with interesting customer issues. Companies retain their best agents, who provide the best customer experiences.

CCaaS solutions are also accessible from anywhere with a solid internet connection, so agents are able to enjoy working in the location they prefer. Their employers are able to offer agents better work-life balance, giving them the power to attract the best talent.

Perception Is Everything: The customer experience isn’t a set of policies that the company creates. It is fully in the perception of the customer. When a customer experiences consistent, excellent service, it’s because of a company culture that celebrates those experiences.

CCaaS is a critical tool in delivering excellence to customers. For instance, when a customer calls about an error on an invoice, the agent can see that it’s not the first time the customer has experienced an invoicing error. The agent can see the chat conversation about invoicing that occurred two months prior, all as a part of an integrated communications solution. The agent knows that how they handle the error will likely have a significant impact on whether the customer will return to do business with them again.

Delivering an exceptional customer experience takes more than CCaaS, but these two elements of your company have a way of working hand-in-hand to elevate your company’s approach to delivering excellence. Contact us at Cloud Source to learn more.

The Changing Nature of Unified Communications Management

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Unified communications management still requires IT teams to take responsibility for security measures.

Experts now predict that nearly half of all companies are using unified communications as a service (UCaaS), and another quarter plan to shift to the cloud by the end of the year. As a result, companies are also increasingly needing to invest in unified communications management.

This means not only managing users and performance, but also areas like administration and security. Shifting to the cloud comes with some labor reduction, but it doesn’t remove the responsibility that IT leaders have for management. Instead, unified communications management requires IT to create new approaches that ensure consistent performance for all employees in all locations as well as removing confusion between application and network service providers as far as where any performance concerns lie.

With the growing number of employees working in remote and hybrid settings, in addition to the increasing role of video communications as a part of UCaaS, the role of unified communications management becomes more complex.

The “Unified Communications and Management Endpoints: 2021-22” study, published by Metrigy, included responses from 400 companies. It designated 68 organizations as “successful” because of their achievement of higher return on investment in areas like cost savings and revenue increases associated with technology investments. Here are four strategies demonstrated by those high-performing companies:

The Integration of IT Service Management With Unified Communications Management: Among successful companies, 72% had an integrated IT service management with unified communications management tools, compared with only 53% of all respondents. The integration of the platforms allows for better insight into applications and configurations for faster problem isolation and resolution.

Deployment of Security Management: Nearly 58% of the highest-performing companies, in comparison with 36% of non-high-performing companies, had deployed a management platform dedicated to security for unified communications. The benefits of this type of platform include consistent policy application across apps, quick identification of threats, and automation in areas like response and restoration. It’s important to note that security platforms can vary, so it’s important to select one that matches well with your specific goals.

Choose the Right Tools: Among successful companies, 41% had invested in management tools developed for a move to UCaaS. Only 27% of overall respondents had invested in similar strategies. The tools covered performance, endpoint and security management, plus administration for end-to-end visibility across all locations, including in-office and remote workers.

Support Remote Workers: Successful companies extended IT support to include remote and work-from-home employees, from areas like guiding remote employees in choosing the right internet plan to assessment of home WiFi coverage and managing voice and video call quality. With the number of employees now working in remote or hybrid settings, IT departments can no longer deprioritize the importance of performance and consistent work experience for these team members.

Unified communications management, with the right tools, can elevate your UCaaS experience. Contact us at Cloud Source for assistance in getting started with your migration to cloud communications and integrating the right management tools into your existing technology.

Remote-Work Security for Hybrid Models

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Remote-work security is getting fortified by new strategies designed to accommodate hybrid environments.

The calendar is closing the loop on a second pandemic year, and while the disruption to the workforce was drastic in terms of IT security, networks, and collaboration, there have been positive outcomes as well. The need to improve remote-work security has caused teams to scramble but has also made ongoing hybrid models more effective.

One major effect of the shift to remote work was the expansion of the security perimeter, which had already been changed by the ongoing shift to cloud services. Security teams were expected to offer immediate extensions to cover masses of unmanaged endpoints.

Cisco’s survey results in the October 2021 Hybrid Work Index provide some insight into the remote work security challenges facing IT teams:

  • From May 2020 to April 2021, the number of mobile devices accessing the corporate network increased by four times.
  • There was an increase of virtual private network (VPN) and remote access by 1.5 times, but malicious access attempts grew even faster at 2.4 times in the same time period.
  • Hybrid workers were pummeled with email threats, with a total of over 100 million landing daily.

If your team had any hesitation about whether to prioritize remote-work security, these numbers make the pressing nature of the problem clearer.

The Hybrid Work Opportunity: Companies are being tasked with creating a hybrid work environment that is flexible but also secure, allowing team members to access the network with the same level of protection no matter where they are working. While it created headaches early in the shift to remote work, the opportunity to jump ahead on security strategies has the benefit of preparing IT teams to support a digital-first strategy. Supporting a strong cyber security plan is the foundation for allowing companies to reach their potential for optimized hybrid work models.

Companies that attempt to take a patchwork approach will find that they are constantly scrambling to address unsecure connections, limited visibility and control, and compromised credentials. If they aren’t approaching the challenges with a unified solution, they will also struggle with a shortage in areas like skills, resources, and time.

Teams can implement five steps to support remote-work security and the hybrid work model:

  1. Build a zero trust network access (ZTNA) strategy by implementing multifactor authentication. Users should be granted only the minimum access they need to do their jobs.
  2. Consider a dynamic security approach like a secure access service edge (SASE) that allows for secure access to applications and maintains a secure environment no matter where users are.
  3. Build a culture of security, training employees on how to recognize malicious emails and other threats. Educate them on the cost of a breach and the important role they play in preventing one.
  4. Build first- and last-line defense with a combination of endpoint security and domain name system (DNS) that prevents both simple and advanced attacks.
  5. Pursue security in email practices. Shifting email to the cloud comes with additional threats, so make sure security matches the level of threat.

The shift to a hybrid work environment promotes a digital-first strategy, but it also comes with a broader set of threats. To get started building a remote-work security plan that protects your assets, contact us at Cloud Source.

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