Cutting Call Center Costs with Cloud Based Solutions

The first is the overall price of the system. Call center hardware can be quite expensive, especially if it needs to handle a large number of agents at the same time. Cloud-based solutions are very cost-effective, however. The cloud-based call center simply pays a flat fee each month (or year, if the vendor offers an annual contract) to gain access to the solution.

Cloud-based call center solutions also tend to cost far less to implement than a physical system. You simply download the software onto the computers and gain immediate access to the cloud-based call center program. Traditional systems require people to travel out to your place of business and install the hardware for a substantial fee.

Maintenance costs are also significantly reduced (and often non-existent) with cloud-based call center solutions. The hosting company performs the maintenance on the hardware and makes sure that everything is functioning properly. If an expensive piece of equipment needs to be replaced, it’s their responsibility to do so, not the cloud-based call centers either.

Another way that cloud-based call centers can save money is through the lower cost of upgrades. It’s much cheaper to modify and improve the system since everything is done through the cloud. The cloud-based call center will stay up-to-date and be able to interoperate with all the latest software and technology.

cloud-based call centers can easily be integrated with other company technology solutions such as customer relationships management software (CRM) and enterprise resource planning solutions (ERP) to streamline other processes of your company. Integrating resources of the company into one comprehensive cloud-based call center solution can help your company have multiple sources of company data on one dashboard. This can guarantee that your company will be able to make much more informed decisions. 

Cloud-based call center solutions also do not have per-agent, per-month fees like most traditional systems. These can quickly add up at a cloud-based call center and whittle away at the profits it would otherwise be making.

One final thing to keep in mind with cloud-based call center solutions - the larger the cloud-based call center, the greater the savings. Frost & Sullivan’s study indicated that 100-seat cloud-based call centers saved an average of 23 percent, 250-seat cloud-based call centers saved an average of 34 percent, and 500-seat cloud-based call centers saved an average 43 percent.

Your familiar legacy call centers that employ on-premise call center systems were limited in terms of operational flexibility and do not scale up alongside your company easily. Traditional call center models will require significant financial investment as well as equipment upgrades to scale up to the level your company may strive for. 

You can thus hire as many cloud-based call center agents as you like without worrying that you’re going to break the bank. It’s actually to your advantage to do so since you are getting a significant return on investment on your cloud-based call center. More agents turn into more profit and more success for the cloud-based call center.

The average handle time for managing calls via a cloud-based call center is much lower compared to its on-premise counterpart. A cloud-based call center can also be easily integrated with other company software solutions like a CRM system to make customer interactions much more frictionless. Cloud-based call centers are also able to manage calls better by routing calls to call agents by assessing call levels and matching with a call agent with an appropriate level of expertise to ensure smoother customer service interactions via your cloud-based call center. 

Skill-based call routing is sure to take away the frustrations of your customer when they feel like their needs are being attended to with a personal touch. If the right agent is not available for your particular cloud-based call center, other agents can share screens to help assist each other in resolving your company’s customer service necessities. Because of this feature, your cloud-based call center is able to reach higher first-call resolution ratings. 

Cloud-based call centers don’t require the same form of maintenance as on-premise call center solutions. cloud-based call centers ensure that system maintenance is done seamlessly so that your cloud-based call center would not come to a standstill during routine maintenance drills. 

Cloud-based call center downtime is sure to not cost your company because of interruptions of service and some services are able to improve the average call center downtime from 175 hours to merely 15 minutes! Reduced downtime means your cloud-based call center can perform as efficiently as ever and you don’t have to scratch your head on how to manage your call center resources during a downtime. 

Cloud-based call centers are able to provide comprehensive data on various metrics to measure your cloud-based call center’s efficiency and success. Companies are able to leverage all of that data to better manage their cloud-based call center and resolve issues and any discrepancies right away. 

You can also employ cloud-based call center customer service satisfaction surveys to track your call center agent’s performance. This data is able to help your company achieve a much higher rating in customer satisfaction.

Cloud-based call center solutions come with security options such as role-based permissions and multifactor authentication methods. These features are able to ensure that your cloud-based call center is managed with utmost care and respect for data privacy. This can be very useful for companies such as those in the healthcare industry that have to comply with privacy policies such as HIPAA (health insurance portability and accountability act) that operate cloud-based call centers.