Anywhere365® is a virtual contact center and enterprise dialogue platform. But why do we focus so much on that virtual (or cloud) part of who we are? We’d like to discuss some of the main benefits. The biggest one, obviously, is that with your entire workforce working from home, on-premise call centers are a lot more difficult to manage. So, why not put your effort in a virtual contact center platform, rather than organizing a (COVID-proof) onsite work space?
At Anywhere365® we believe virtual contact center platforms are the future of the call center. In our many years of experience we’ve seen very successful cases of customer service departments helping customers from remote offices. And not just with voice-related solutions. More and more customer dialogues taking place online. For example via messaging platforms, where agents and bots help the customer together. This omnichannel communications management is where the Anywhere365® virtual contact center platform excels. In fact, Gartner has recently recognized the power of our contact center solution, which we have built native to Microsoft Teams.
Many of the most successful contact center stories started with choosing powerful and user-friendly virtual contact center platform. Powerful may sound very obvious, but intuitivity of the software is an important key to manage a cohesive and productive workforce. If you do it right, the only other thing agents need is a reliable internet connection. And coffee, may be.
We have 4 reasons to believe that taking your contact center solution to the cloud will make your business more successful. In this blog post we will give you the first two reasons.
A virtual contact center platform doesn’t care about the geolocation of the agent. And so shouldn’t you. If you have a global business, you want your contact center to be available 24 hours a day. And yes, you can. A virtual contact center platform lets you hire agents in e.g. France, India, Canada, Brazil and Australia. Ensuring that your most essential time zones are covered and customers from all over the globe experience your best customer service ever.
But there’s another upside to the location-independent characteristic of virtual contact center platforms. If cloud-based contact center software allows agents to work from anywhere, and at any time, they won’t need to commute and will experience less stress. And we all know that a stress free agent is a more efficient one. And a more customer-friendly one. They are able to find a friendlier tone, even after hours of work. Research by McKinsey in June 2020 actually shows that agent happiness can increase higher productivity and more satisfied customers, while decreasing operating costs.
Many companies have invested quite some money in keeping systems alive that actually hold them back from a great performance. On premise servers, a PBX, workforce management systems… The return of these investments will keep decreasing as innovation in the cloud is at maximum pace and legacy systems are becoming a serious threat to business continuity:
Managing and maintaining legacy systems is often one of the most expensive parts of the budget. But modernizing these systems, or even getting rid of them, gives you the freedom to drastically rethink and redesign your business communications now and be ready for future business requirements, without significant additional overhead.
Virtual contact center platforms are relatively inexpensive and easier to scale, because it’s no longer about the hardware. Our Anywhere365® Dialogue Cloud for instance is billed per user. Which means that you can control your costs, even based on seasonality, without creating negative effects on your staff or the customer experience.
That was it for now. In our next piece we will discuss how virtual contact centers impact the security of sensitive customer data and how it enhances the customer experience.