Customer Service in the Cloud Takes Flight

If you have a contact center, small or large, chances are that you've already moved some of your customer care infrastructure to the cloud. It's no longer a new trend; it's an organizational standard. Frost & Sullivan forecasts hosted contact center earnings to grow at 34.1% annually from 2009 through 2013. Why are companies moving customer care to the cloud? Should the contingency arise to the productivity boost from refocusing IT staff on the core business, a move to the cloud provides big payback for IT organizations: a pay-as-you-use pricing model that eliminates CapEx spending, the ability to easily handle spiky service volumes, access to a variety of newer technologies, and supreme operational performance.

However, simply migrating new designs using the same old customer care paradigm negates so much of the value that the cloud has to offer. It's akin to being unexpectedly bumped from coach to first class by your airline and not taking advantage of every free convenience. Imagine enjoying the larger more comfortable seat, however never stretching your legs, using the plush designer blanket, or indulging in the celebrity chef meal. Sure, that restful seat and quiet ambience improve the flight quite a bit. Yet, if you don't take advantage of other services available to you you're leaving a lot of the value behind. And many of us don't even know what amenities are available. Did you know that some airlines offer turndown service, down bedding, eight-course tasting menus, skin care products, pajamas and slippers? In a similar way, cloud-based customer service can include a long list of exciting features - all at your disposal if you choose to take advantage. If you've grown accustomed to the confinement of delivering customer service via on premises research, you may be unpracticed at stretching your legs and seeking innovative services. Nevertheless, you should start to rely on these perks.

But there's furthermore to continuous improvement than better performance and accuracy. To keep up with today's consumers, you need to provide integrated services across several modalities just as voice, SMS, and mobile. With the cloud, you can incorporate new technologies without making the big investment bets you'd have to make with on-premises deployments. This gives you the freedom to try new things, to skip lengthy purchasing processes and to escape infrastructure estimations. Your clients will reward you for you efforts. It's shown that clients are more loyal to a business with higher quality customer service and the service options that are available how and when they want them. According to a 2010 J.D. Power satisfaction study, 37% of clients who changed their banking relationship did so because of poor customer service. Customers are more demanding than ever earlier. With the continuous improvement of the cloud, your customer service can keep pace with rapidly evolving consumer sophistication, providing a foundation to measure, evolve, and modernize your customer service.

Whether your goal is to deploy new technologies, generate more revenue, or increase self-service to reduce cost, the cloud can help. The key is to actively adopt a new customer care paradigm that incorporates all the value that the cloud has to offer: understand all available features, trust your vendor and rely on their expertise, and adopt continuous improvement. Organizations that embrace all aspects of cloud are just one free upgrade away from providing first-class customer service.

Dena Skrbina is the Senior Director of Solutions Marketing at Nuance with 20 years of experience helping contact centers deploy the right solutions for their business. With an education background in Computer Science and diverse professional experience including IVR and CTI/ACD Programming, Sales & Marketing, and Solutions Consulting, Dena brings a wealth of real-world contact center understanding coupled with a solid technical foundation. Today, Dena and her Solutions Marketing team focus on uniting Nuance speech, proactive, mobile, and hosting technologies with the expertise from automating billions of calls to offer modern customer care solutions that maximize savings and improve the consumer experience.