Tuesday, September 16, 2014
By CallFire, Follow me on Google+
Business is changing. Dearly held precepts and assumptions regarding the ‘proper’ way to run a company have not stood up to scrutiny in the 21st Century.
One of those assumptions was that workers would come together each day in one location to do their jobs. That’s becoming increasingly irrelevant in an age when most of us have the tools to do our jobs - at least in part - from wherever we happen to be. The flexibility of the mobile worker has increased productivity, as businesses are no longer tied by the arbitrary binds of office hours and location.
Of course, some jobs – like construction or surgery – can’t be done remotely. Others – like graphic design or coding – are self-evidently more suited to the quiet and solitude of a domestic office. Then there are a bunch of jobs that, sure, could be done from home, but face reluctance from employers hesitant to undergo such a dramatic change in company culture.
Call center work falls into this latter category. Traditional contact centers are housed in large office spaces, with rows of callers taking a steady stream of calls. Some business owners are understandably hesitant to start emptying the building, renting a small head office for executive staff, and embarking on a new era of at-home employees. It seems too… revolutionary.
And so it is, but revolutionary ideas are grist to the mill of any successful business. Just ask the 34% of businesses who took part in an Aberdeen Group survey in 2012, proudly declaring their status as users of cloud-based call center solutions. More and more companies are following suit. For startups in particular, the prospect of installing a complete on-premise IT infrastructure from the ground up is much less appealing than going with the cloud from the getgo.
A cloud based solution is fast and easy to implement. No special equipment is required. All you need is a computer and an internet connection. This dramatic cost-cutting is allowing idea-rich, cash-poor entrepreneurs to enter the game, which has to be a good thing for the industry. Here are some of the advantages of setting up your call center in the cloud:
Scalability is Built In
Another key benefit of a cloud-hosted call center is the ease with which businesses can scale their operations up or down according to demand. At home agents can be made available on a more flexible basis. In brick and mortar call centers, an unexpected drop in call flow can cost thousands of dollars in resources.
Global Delivery, 24/7
As the number of online services swells, so too does consumer expectation. Cloud based solutions allow businesses to offer on-demand support to their clients, available any time of day, wherever it’s needed.
Personalized Customer Service
A cloud-based call center lets businesses pick and choose specific services so they can personalize the user experience. These services can easily be customized according to customer demographic. In addition to finely-tuned personalization, cloud call centers allow companies to integrate a variety of applications within a pre-existing infrastructure. Billing software, purchase order management, business reporting, analytics – the possibilities are only as limited as the services you require.
Cloud hosted contact centers can help businesses lower costs and deliver better results at the same time. From customer service to billing management, every single function of your business can be controlled from one place, all of which makes the Cloud sound pretty heavenly from where we’re standing.