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The Evolution of the Contact Center – 15 Reasons to Consider Moving To The Cloud In 2016’s

Omni-Channel World

A Contact Center Operations team’s members by nature have a lot on their respective plates,

and the call center environment naturally lends itself to a state of flux – the constant pursuit of

improvement. However, as the Omnichannel landscape continues to sharpen its definition, the

need for your brand to communicate faster and even more efficiently, whether Voice, Video,

Email, Chat, Text or on Social Media has never been clearer. This coupled with regulatory

compliancy measures such as PCI, HIPAA and “the works” amid all this change has led to an

unprecedented rate of evolution in this space. Impressively and since their conception, Contact

Centers have evolved from their “home-grown” application silo approach to offering scalable

agnostic solutions within Contact Routing, Workforce Optimization and Telecom support.

Today, all of this functionality is offered in a by-prong design, in either On-Premise or Cloud-

based architecture.

“When managed correctly, your customer demands can be met and exceeded, the cost to meet

such demands can be kept down and overall business goals can be achieved, shared Stephen

Ferber, CEO of Golden Gate BPO Solutions. However, in a recent study published by

Dimension Data's 2015 Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report, “75% of companies

recognize customer service as a competitive differentiator; yet, customer satisfaction levels are

down for the fourth consecutive year.” This highlights an opportunity for Call Center Managers,

especially since customers’ expectations (in particular, Millennials) continue to evolve, and they

demand to be able to get in touch with your brand – whenever they want and wherever they

want to online and 24/7. To meet this new standard expectation, there are a number of reasons

to consider moving your call center operations to The Cloud in order to set the stage for a great

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customer experience. Imagine a dashboard where you can contribute to the organizations’

success by providing actionable, real-time data from silos that cross-communicate well, and

being able to handle ebbs and flows of day-to-day and seasonality and taking that all in stride,

because your team and all the call center agents have all the tools they need to be successful

and effective.

How to keep up and get ahead of the rest? In my humble opinion, and for transparency, I’ve

only done a short stint in Telemarketing, but other than that, cannot put myself into your shoes

as a Contact Center Manager. What I can tell you is that my customers who chose to use our

Cloud Services have seen a dramatic improvement in profitability, customer and agent

satisfaction, and overall increase in nimbleness. From the outside looking in, being more nimble

and flexible in this Omnichannel world, seems to make them happier

There are two major Contact Center solution designs, On-premise and Cloud-based.

On-premise Contact Center solutions are functional, but they have a tendency to be in silo

environments with cumbersome manual processes. Of course they work – but so does a ‘base-

model’ of whatever car you’re driving, but if you’re like me, you like the bells and whistles and

prefer just to drive the car, not have to roll down the window and do anything manually.

As I mentioned above, I lean toward Cloud adaption and believe it will be leveraged extensively

in 2016 because of these 15 benefits to operating a Call Center in a Cloud-based environment:

1) the ease of scalability

2) flexibility to change on the fly via portals

3) tight integration into CRM

4) the thought of never paying for an upgrade or maintenance renewal again

5) being easy to install

6) being easy to maintain

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7) being easy to use

8) change can be so easy that extensive planning and implementation pains could be a

thing of the past

9) ability to request change on your behalf to the Cloud provider

10) ability to manage yourself in an intuitive portal

11) managing the departure of a past agent for a new hire

12) if you need to add features; it’s as simple as a monthly price increase with your Cloud

provider and the features are made available the next day

13) no CapEx spend on new licensing

14) no professional services to install

15) no more lengthy timelines for completion

Of course which environment is better for the Contact Center depends upon complexity of

environment, number of agents, stability and seasonality of the business. Advances in

Workforce Optimization, Survey, Metrics, and harnessing Big Data will continue to drive the

evolution of the Contact Center environment well beyond 2016. Happy to chat about exploring

available options to support your Contact Center into the future.

I love to resolve business challenges by helping organizations like yours find the right

customized IT solution for each unique situation. Please feel free to get in touch with me at

mgray@carouselindustries.com if you’d like to bounce some ideas off of me or chat about

architecting a solution for your needs.