How cloud contact centers empower delightful customer experiences

The ideal contact center will deliver consistently excellent experiences to customers, via their preferred communication channels — whether that’s voice, email, chat, SMS, or social media.

Moreover, a modern contact center’s feature set will allow agents — and the organizations they work for — to harness the power of cloud-based services, enabling much quicker time to market as well as superior flexibility and scalability compared to on-premises infrastructure.

The worldwide cloud-based contact center market is predicted to grow to $36.1 billion by 2025 at a compound annual growth rate of 25.8%. A major engine of this ongoing growth is the overall versatility of cloud contact centers.

More specifically, cloud-based contact center platforms can:

Easily integrate channels such as social media and SMS to allow customers to reach you via the channel of their choice.
Connect to business-critical tools like customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.
Be modified as a company’s customer base grows or otherwise changes.

Webex Contact Center features, such as omnichannel support and CRM integration, offer companies these particular benefits and many others, driving exceptional experiences for their customers.

Leading benefits of a cloud-based contact center

Cloud contact centers provide a comprehensive and convenient experience for agents and customers alike. Some of the biggest advantages of using one include:

Agent productivity and focus

Needing to frequently switch applications and contexts is a major productivity killer. According to University of Michigan professor David E. Meyer, moving between tasks can decrease productivity by as much as 40%.

Because they’re so well integrated, cloud contact centers spare agents from this fate. Data points such as full customer interaction histories are available in one consolidated interface, alongside information from CRMs.

With everything they need right at their fingertips, agents can better serve customers. There’s more time to devote to resolving issues, and less required for tracking down essential data and context.

Multiple communication options for customers

Contact centers have evolved far beyond just being destinations for customer phone calls. Chat, text messaging, email, and social media messaging are now deeply interwoven into the customer experience as well.

Cloud contact center features allow customers to engage over their preferred channels and to switch between these channels as necessary. According to Gartner, less than 10% of all customer interactions were resolved through self-service interfaces alone as of late 2019. This number underscores the importance of both:

Having high-quality automated channels for self-service, such as intelligent virtual agents or chatbots.
Providing live channels that customers can use to continue the interaction if they need additional assistance beyond self-service options.

Because cloud contact centers are so flexible and scalable, they can more reliably connect customers to the combination of new and traditional channels that may be needed to resolve an interaction. For example, an initial call might lead to a follow-up via email or chat. This workflow is easy to set up using Webex Contact Center.

Customizable and secure collaboration

Customizing and scaling an on-premises contact center can be very complicated. In contrast, cloud contact centers offer straightforward, open application programming interfaces (APIs) for connecting them to other services.

Setting up an integration can be as easy as dragging and dropping Service A to Service B. At the same time, this API flexibility doesn’t jeopardize the overall security of the contact center solution.

Indeed, one of the key Webex Contact Center features is enterprise-grade security. Collaboration remains flexible while also being safe and compliant.

Important Webex Contact Center features to know

These advantages and others are the result of multiple Webex Contact Center features. Some of the key functionalities include:

Omnichannel communications

Webex Contact Center supports all major communications channels, from email and chat to voice and social media. Plus, these channels are unified, so there aren’t any data silos that lead to delays and subpar customer service.

For channels like email and chat, workflows can be highly automated thanks to customizable rules for how to route messages based on subject line. Intelligent virtual agents can respond 24/7 to customer inquiries.

Automatic call routing and queue management

In addition to seamlessly and intelligently handling emails, Webex Contact Center also features smart management of calls and queues. Every customer call is routed to the best agent based on current availability, skills, and other adjustable criteria.

Overflow queues can also be created easily. Customer calls can cascade to multiple phone numbers and be assigned to queues based on specific skill sets.

Call recording and searchability

Recording a call is helpful for purposes such as training and quality assurance.

With Webex Contact Center, a call can easily be recorded and then searched later by agents and supervisors. This searchability allows contact center staff to find recordings by titles or other attributes.

Dashboards and reports

Just as call recording provides definitive information about what occurred during a customer interaction, dashboards and reports deliver additional clear insights into contact center activity.

Agents can see trends over the near and long terms. Outcomes of customer interactions can be compared with business results over a similar time period.