What is an enterprise cloud contact center?

An enterprise cloud contact center helps businesses handle inbound and outbound customer communications over the internet. This is done through cloud software that supports a variety of communication channels that can be used to provide efficient and personalized customer service, including voice, video, SMS, instant messaging, and more.

As enterprise businesses look to meet their customers on the channels they prefer, cloud-based contact center solutions help them deliver superior customer experiences while making agent work easier and more productive.

Some enterprise contact centers in operation today are running on legacy technology that can’t keep up with the way customers and businesses now communicate. If you still depend on dated call center technology, you may be feeling the pain of your system’s limitations right now. That could mean the inability to add new channels — such as messaging, video, chat, or VoIP — or easily update your basic call routing structure. You may have adopted some cloud-based contact center solutions, but without a comprehensive, omnichannel approach, those may live in silos and can’t create the end result you’re looking for.

A cloud contact center uses modern communications technology to provide a streamlined alternative to on-premises call centers. Striving to not just meet but exceed expectations for customer service? Want to have meaningful yet efficient interactions? A cloud contact center addresses these needs for enterprise businesses by providing services such as voice, text, social media, and video communications, over a high-speed internet connection. Contact center providers also handle all the technical setup, equipment, and maintenance of the servers.

As a comprehensive suite of tools, applications, and cloud-hosted services, enterprise contact centers typically include sophisticated call routing, agent management, analytics, and more.

These days, no one wants to be tied to physical hardware that’s expensive and difficult to upgrade. Such an environment taxes agents’ time and experience, limiting their flexibility to communicate from a location of their preference. This can hinder access to information and lead to frustration that impacts the customer experience.

Cloud contact centers serve as a central hub for inbound and outbound customer communications and are compatible with mobile devices, desk phones, and softphones. A cost-efficient alternative to legacy phone systems, a cloud-based contact center is hosted over the internet to allow employees to work across one platform, regardless of location. It creates a few key benefits as a result:

Today’s customers require several digital touchpoints when interacting with a brand. With social media, instant messaging, video conferencing, and more readily available, customer service operations have progressed significantly from the days of long hold times and 9-5 business hours. This “always-available” mentality is both a challenge and an opportunity for businesses that are slow to adapt, as people expect their favorite tools and technology to follow them from one interaction to the next.

For an elevated customer experience and a quicker path to brand loyalty, enterprises need to offer a variety of digital channels to provide superior service throughout the customer journey. CX is the difference between retention and churn, making cloud contact centers a driver of business growth and a competitive differentiator for customer interactions. Their remote-friendly infrastructure and scalable solutions make enterprise cloud contact centers the collaboration and customer engagement platform of choice for the growing hybrid workforce.

They can also help measure your customer experience — and the effectiveness of your communications — through real-time dashboards and custom reports. Agents and supervisors can quickly access statistics around agent-customer interactions as well as optimize scheduling and queueing to reduce wait time and friction.

Organizations that opt for a cloud-based contact center won’t need to budget for real estate, disparate network carriers, and the headcount for hardware troubleshooting. And without the hard costs of hardware or an expansive IT workforce, a cloud-hosted contact center becomes immediately more affordable than traditional systems. By relying on a cloud provider for enterprise contact center services, you can focus on setting agents up for success and making customers happy — saving you both time and money in the process.

An added bonus? The cost savings that come with bundling software licenses. In fact, it’s been reported that 52% of CX and IT business leaders use the same cloud provider for both their unified communications and contact center platforms.

Friction hinders meaningful customer and employee experiences, so the ability to assist customers promptly can actually minimize disengagement and boost employee morale. Cloud-based contact center solutions help agents and supervisors enjoy immediate productivity and a streamlined call-handling experience when engaging with customers.

These solutions also help bring customer service professionals into the modern work-from-home era, as the cloud contact centers easily enable the flexible work that today’s agents crave. The remote-friendly, location-agnostic technology lets you work across time zones with extended customer service hours and promotes seamless collaboration between teams.

Without insight into agents’ performance, it can be difficult to measure their effectiveness or identify potential areas for improvement.

Cloud-based contact centers commonly feature dashboards that unlock key insights for supervisors to measure the proficiency and performance of their agents. With access to real-time analytics, they can view up-to-date metrics on engagements across multiple channels, including video, and then easily identify opportunities to streamline calls, re-skill agents based on need and performance, and better optimize the outcomes of customer interactions.

Disparate tools and applications naturally create disjointed workflows that sap morale and even damage customer trust. A comprehensive contact center washes all that inefficiency away, building natural resiliency, flexibility, and agility in operations through a holistic approach to customer service.

Call routing features send calls or chats to individual agents based on skill levels or other parameters, such as the time of day of a customer’s phone number, while routing profiles can be customized to reflect any combination of all. No matter how many calls, cases, or employee interactions you have, traffic is directed seamlessly to the right resources, taking any guesswork out of the routing process for all parties. By quickly matching the caller to a knowledgeable agent, reducing wait times, and efficiently resolving customer queries, a cloud-based contact center helps lay the foundation for long-term relationships and scalable operations.

And because everything is configured and deployed in the cloud, you can eliminate the need for onsite IT resources and pesky IT requests.

With enterprise cloud contact centers, you can adjust settings as you go — simplifying processes for not just supervisors and agents, but also IT admin.
When IT wants to make a quick change or modify permissions for users, they can carry out those changes instantly across systems — no matter where they’re located. IT can adjust any setting from a secure web portal, even in the middle of the night or on the go.

Since a contact center touches many types of digital interactions beyond phone calls, admins can also adjust incoming cases, post-interaction surveys, agent views, and more. This flexibility comes in hand as companies grow and add new services or product offerings.

Zoom Contact Center answers the growing need for an all-in-one cloud contact center and unified communications platform that enables easy enterprise collaboration and customer engagement into one intuitive experience.

Zoom Contact Center agents and supervisors who already use Zoom Meetings, Zoom Phone, and/or Zoom Team Chat will recognize the familiar, simple, and intuitive experience. Unlike most enterprise contact center technologies that require a separate video platform, Zoom Contact Center is one of the first omnichannel contact center platforms that is natively optimized for video and supports a robust suite of channels, such as voice, SMS, and webchat.

Designed to increase agent productivity, Zoom Contact Center streamlines communication to foster a greater sense of collaboration between colleagues, while improving the customer experience. It enables contact center staff to reach back-office experts to drive faster resolution and removes the barriers that typically exist between the contact center and the rest of the organization. As a result, organizations experience greater employee collaboration and productivity.

Zoom Contact Center is available in the U.S., Canada, the UK, and Ireland.