5 Reasons Your Contact Center Should Be in the Cloud

As smart enterprises tap digital technologies to improve their business outcomes, they also have to ensure that customers remain at the forefront of their transformation.

Simple, right?

Today, customers demand almost instantaneous access to information, so your contact center has to be one step ahead.

Paramount to getting ahead is connecting agents with real-time knowledge sources about your products and customers and being able to rapidly respond to customer requests across all channels including web, voice, email, chat and social.

Because in this era of digitization, businesses must be able to connect with digital-savvy customers in a digital manner.

That’s means surpassing customer-service expectations on digital channels or risk losing them to competitors altogether.

For smart businesses, this isn’t an option.

That’s why they’re going all in on moving their customer contact centers to the cloud.

In fact, 62% of organizations already have migrated to a cloud call center solution, according to DMG Consulting, while 46% of the companies that haven’t migrated their call-center service are considering moving to the cloud soon.

Here are 5 reasons your business needs to abandon its legacy on-premise system and begin delivering state-of-the-art customer-care solutions.

1. Accelerated deployment

Since you’re moving the solution to the cloud, there’s no hardware to install or maintain, no need to set up infrastructure or find compatible software typically required for legacy on-premise systems. Let’s face it, dealing with old PBX systems can be more frustrating than trying to put together an IKEA coffee table. Thankfully, setting up cloud-based call center software is usually no more difficult that installing an app on a computer. It’s an out-of-the box solution – no assembly required!

2. Cost savings – Ka-Ching!

Tired of replacing your onsite system every five to 10 years because of aging hardware and obsolete software? It’s time to bring on the cloud. With a cloud-based system, you can forget about account-emptying investments on unneeded servers, storage or pricey software licenses. Instead you will typically work with flat-rate billing for a monthly subscription. Yes, you’ll need to invest in  quality bandwidth to ensure rapid action from your call team, but your overall cloud savings will more than mitigate any needed capital expenditure. With the cloud, you only pay for what you use — nice!

3. Flexibility and scalability

Since you’ll ditch your legacy on-premise system and its chunky hardware requirements, enjoy knowing that your cloud-based contact center has the flexibility to add new phone lines and features as needed to deal with the up-and-down cycles of call volume. Having seasonally high phone traffic is great, but you’ll need additional hard phones and computers with an on-premise solution. When calls slow on a cloud-based solution, you’ll be able to scale down without boxes of costly and unused equipment taking up space in the office closet.

4. Outsourced maintenance = less stress

You’ve called vendors, the Maytag repairman and even asked the office administrator to jiggle some wires in a desperate effort to fix the bug in your on-premise contact-center software. Meanwhile customers are going bye-bye. Sound familiar? By taking to the cloud, you outsource the daily maintenance requirements to just one vendor, allowing you to optimize your internal IT resources and ensuring your customers are on the phone making orders instead of being dropped. That’s a win-win for everyone!

5. Security and compliance

Not many organizations can afford the resources or time to acquire the latest security measures that meet today’s increasingly strict privacy regulations. Maintaining strong physical security across many business locations—each with its own on-premise system—simply is not practical or cost effective.

With a cloud solution, you’ll have access to greater security measures to protect customer information than with traditional premise-based systems. What’s more, with complicated compliance requirements, flexibility to adapt to new regulatory changes with a centralized platform for recording, archiving and deleting calls is key in controlling risks. Cloud technology allows you to significantly lower the cost of adding new features to meet emerging compliance requirements.

Ready to learn more how migrating to a cloud-based contact center can transform your customer care and your business? Then, think about Amazon Connect.

Amazon Connect is a pay-as-you-need, cloud-based contact center that delivers better customer service at a lower price. It includes self-service, CRM integration, Alexa functionality, is scalable and elastic and includes custom reporting on an open platform that is AI-enabled for translation, transcription and sentiment analysis. There are no upfront payments or long-term commitments and because it runs on AWS, there is no infrastructure to manage.

As an Amazon Connect Service Delivery Partner, Lightstream can help you with an end-to-end contact center solution. Through our unique engagement model, we’ll envision, design and help you implement an Amazon Connect solution that’s right for you, including ongoing management and support services to keep your customer care center operating optimally.