First, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted air travel causing flight cancellations and work stoppages at airports. It then quickly led to a second crisis at travel call centers: hour long wait times and angry customers. This crisis gave birth to a creative solution. With decreased need for personnel at airports, airline and airport staff were reassigned to help at the call center. Using a cloud contact center, these newly trained service agents were quickly able to work from home or remote offices. This solved two problems: idle staff were able to keep their jobs; and additional agents were able to assist customers and decrease contact center wait times.
The advantages of a cloud contact center
Cloud contact centers are the perfect solution for ensuring the continuation of quality customer service while protecting the health of contact center employees.
Customer service agents and managers can work anywhere
With a good internet connection and a PC or mobile phone, contact agents can stay on the job during a disruption from natural disaster or contagious disease. Agents can work from home and avoid exposing themselves and coworkers. With cloud contact centers, employers can also more effectively recruit and retain call agents.
Low cost of entry
Not only is there no upfront cost for hardware or software purchases, cloud contact centers like EVOX Connect come with easy-to-use management and agent apps to allow customers to quickly design and implement an enterprise class contact center. Cloud contact centers can also easily scale from one or two agents to hundreds, staff can be located anywhere, and office moves can be made without disruption.
What do you need to make a cloud contact center successful?
Getting callers to the right agent quickly
Getting callers to the right agent is not a trivial goal!
It requires a properly programmed Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), which includes an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, call queuing, and intelligent call distribution. The goal is to speedily answer every call, determine the caller’s needs, and connect the caller to a suitable agent as quickly as possible. With a highly flexible and web-based app, an ACD can be programmed quickly from anywhere at any time to meet changing business needs.
What is an ACD, IVR, call queuing, and call distribution »
Make callers and agents happy
A good contact center not only needs to quickly direct the caller to the right agent, it must also provide the agent with contact knowledge. This background includes the caller’s contact history as well as recent purchases and issues. This allows the agent to provide a more personalized service and resolve issues quickly.
Each EVOX Connect agent has an app that instantly provides access to the caller’s history and relationship information. Agents can update the knowledge base during or after a call, as well as use tasks and memos to provide followup and share knowledge with colleagues. This gives agents the ability to control and manage their workflow, empowering them to provide a personable and satisfactory experience to the caller. And, happier agents mean a lower turnover rate.
What are the functions of an Agent App »
Empower contact center managers
A good contact center starts with motivated and responsible managers. They have to build and train their teams, design and program the ACD to direct calls to the right agent, monitor team performance, and track the sentiment and responses of customers.
EVOX Connect Cloud provides management, monitoring and analysis tools to allow managers to stay in touch with their teams and manage the ACD any time they detect changes in customer traffic and issues. Managers succeed by staying responsive even when there are disruptions that keep them away from the office. With the voice recording and text transcript capabilities of EVOX Connect, managers can also build up a valuable and accurate database for analysis and training to continue to improve their contact center.
To learn more about Connect manager go to »
Keeping data safe
All businesses require that their customer and contact information be kept safe. This is why EVOX Connect is built on AWS to ensure that contact data is protected against physical and network intrusion and attacks.
Challenging times for contact centers
Contact centers are key to the digital economy as the need for service and support increases. At the same time, traditional contact centers with agents sitting shoulder to shoulder are a health hazard.
When the Coronavirus first invaded Seoul, contact centers were one of the first clusters of contagion. The ONLY solution to continue operation and not endanger staff is to move the contact center to the cloud. Agents can work remotely, and those who need to be in the center can be spaced out to minimize virus spread. It also allows contact centers to quickly scale up or down depending on customer traffic. As small and medium businesses are faced with the same customer demands as enterprises, this is the best way to quickly establish your contact center, not just for now, but for the future.
To learn more about EVOX Connect go to »
