Cloud Contact Centers Vs. On-Premise Call Centers – What’s Better?

The customer management industry is under a massive transition. Transitioning from traditional calling systems to cloud contact centers is a customer approach strategy that most companies are adopting. If you are wanting to join the bandwagon but aren’t sure if you make the switch, then here’s an analysis that will help you understand the difference between contact center cloud solutions and on-premise call centers.

Definitions:
Cloud Contact Centers:
A cloud call center is the main hub of a customer management system that envisages all sorts of customer communication. The ‘cloud’ is the center that makes interaction with all customers possible from anywhere via multiple modes of communication, namely omni-channel communication. This primarily includes voice, email, internet, social media, chat messengers Etc. If your customers are keen on using digital channels to voice their grievances, then it is only essential to integrate this technology in your operations.

On-premise Call Centers:
This approach works very differently compared to a traditional call center setups. Here is where Call Center Software comes into play though On-premise is hardware-based that may require the providers intervention in terms of expansions and upgrades. However, the entire architecture related to this approach is based on a unified software communication platform for customer interactions. This is also installed at the location base of the organization, accompanied by communication hardware, software and physical space with dedicated communication servers. As a result, an IT team is important for the installation and maintenance of these call centers.

Direct comparison between Contact Center Cloud Solutions and on-premise call centers:
There is a list of factors that companies consider when comparing these two technologies. It goes as follows:

1. Implementation: Setting up an on-premise center takes a few days because you need to have a compatible software and hardware in place. You also need to wait for the license and a space where you can accommodate this set up. On the other hand, when implementing a cloud contact center, since it is software based and over the net, the setup time is almost instant!
2. Costs: A couple of upfront costs need to be made for the hardware, software, licenses and housing servers when it comes to on-premise call centers. You also need to renew/upgrade the hardware every 5-10 years to keep your systems updated. As for cloud contact centers, there are no hardware or infrastructure costs involved. All you need is a healthy net connection with high bandwidth, and a monthly subscription.
3. Features: On-premise call centers may have feature requirements that may take a little longer to deploy. Whereas, cloud contact centers are centrally controlled by the already functional platform created by the service provider.

Wish to deploy a Call Center Software for your organization? Contact SlashRTC right away!

How Do I Choose the Best Contact Center Solutions for My Company?

You’ll certainly begin to shape your call centre deployment plan when you begin your scan, armed with your questionnaire. You’ll reach out to contact centre solutions vendors, who can take you through their offerings. It will all come down to cost if they are answering all of your questions to your satisfaction and their solution seems to be the best fit. Is there some kind of teaching included? Dedicated assistance? Are there any secret payments that you won’t find out about right after you’ve signed the contract? Inquire for a presentation or a demo. Request a sample recording to begin with.

What do you have to lose as you will definitely be given a demo for sure. In that case, see how the pricing works out for your organisation and a compare the delta of cost savings that your organisation witnesses by deploying the right contact centre solutions. You should investigate and scope out several call centre solutions to find the right one for your company, just as you might seek a second opinion in your healthcare. It is critical to the future of your business.

SlashRTC’s cloud-based virtual Streams Call Center provides world-class inbound and outbound Streams Call Center capabilities independent of agent location, with features including Salesforce CTI Integration, call logging, accurate monitoring, call queues, lifetime insights, and more. It also doesn’t need any upfront hardware or applications thanks to SlashRTC’s cloud-based approach.

Why Should I Be Considering a Contact Centre Solutions Company?

If you want to succeed in today’s world, where consumers have too many options on how to invest their money, you must be able to stick out from the crowd and have a superior experience. Let’s face it: the product or service isn’t really original. When you struggle to meet your consumers’ needs, your “loyal” customers will tell you by taking their company next door to your competitors. Customer loyalty is what distinguishes good companies from one another. A contact centre solutions Company along with advanced Automatic Speech Recognition Solutions provides services that aren’t often included with a standard calling service. They are as follows:

• Skills-based Routing
• Call Recording
• Computer Technology Integration
• Desktop Notifications
• CRM Integrations
• Supervisory Modes (Silent Listen, Whisper and Barge-in)
• Warm Call Transfer
• Automatic Speech Recognition Solutions
• Analytics and Reporting

Prep your business for Customers to expect more from you using Conversational IVRs

Customers today expect more – they expect quicker problem solving, customised experiences, and successful self-service. Despite the fact that conventional IVR systems are designed to provide self-service via phone, minimise call frequency, and improve agent efficiency, these objectives are rarely achieved. For escalations, conflicts, and complicated problems, customers typically prefer phone-based experiences.

Customers are often confused by conventional IVR implementations that use touch-tone and dialog-based instructions, complicated routing, and convoluted navigation menus. As a consequence, calls are diverted to live operators, resulting in higher operating costs and reduced efficiency.

As a result, companies must find effective ways to resolve consumer concerns while simultaneously addressing the challenges of conventional IVRs. So what’s the answer? An IVR that talks back to you! A Conversational IVR.

Conversational IVRs, which are created by conversational AI companies, provide a unique voice-based and hands-free solution in which consumers can communicate using natural language rather than selecting options from a long static menu like conventional IVRs. With the assistance of Natural Language Understanding, conversational IVR systems can now predict the caller’s needs and identify the context of a conversation (NLU).

Conversational IVR can understand both the meaning and the reasoning of the issue thanks to automated speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU) engines. By removing detours and inefficient pathways to resolution, getting the customer’s intent right reduces handling times.

Benefits Of Conversational IVR

Streamlined Operational Costs

It’s critical for businesses to cut contact centre costs while maintaining a high level of customer service. In many ways, conversational and intelligent IVR systems have been critical to cost-cutting.

One way is to reduce contact centre costs by increasing call resolution and deflection rates. In addition, conversational IVR encourages improved agent utilisation, which lowers labour costs.

Reduce Contact Center Call Volume

Traditional IVRs are ineffective at meeting consumers’ needs because they rely on list-based menus. After walking the caller through a long list of choices, they may decide not to address the problem at all. Calls are routed to live agents for resolution in this situation.

Customers will directly speak about their problem in natural language with conversational IVRs, and the system would recommend the best possible solution. This reduces the number of times users would try to resolve a problem, decreasing the volume of calls to the contact centre.

Agent Skill Based Routing

Customers are forced to contact human agents due to the ineffectiveness of classical IVRs in resolving problems. With more calls piling up, agents would be unable to manage the high volume of calls, resulting in call abandonment, lengthy wait and handling times, and reduced productivity.

Customers may be successfully involved via the IVR system without having to connect to an agent, unless in exceptional circumstances. This gives agents more time to focus on key problems that require human intervention and to settle issues definitively, resulting in increased agent productivity.

Adapting to customer behaviour requirements

A Conversational IVR created by conversational AI companies should be able to create their own database and intelligence based on customer interactions, thanks to AI and machine learning. This aids them in enhancing their overall ability to resolve customer concerns.

This information is then used in subsequent interactions to respond to the customer’s behaviour and needs as effectively as possible.

Higher Resolution Rates For Better Sales performance scores

Conversational IVRs should route calls to agents who are better suited to settle unique problems rather than routing calls to the first available agent because they can detect complicated requests. This results in a higher rate of customer concerns being resolved and also enhancing the customer experience.

Conclusion

Customers are expecting more agile, faster, and easier ways to settle their concerns, so intelligent IVR systems are becoming increasingly important in improving and modernising customer service. Many firms will deploy conversational IVR systems in the coming years to reduce costs, increase agent efficiency, and increase customer experience.

The Digital Customer Journey: Understanding the role of the Contact Centre in creating a connected experience

The digital customer journey is distinct from a physical shopping experience, because it is remarkably similar. With consumers’ ever-changing demands, it can be difficult for companies to keep up and ensure that customers have a smooth purchasing experience from beginning to end.

The customer journey is made up of all of the interactions that a user has with your brand or company. Rather than looking at static actions one by one, the trip integrates the customer’s experience and documents it as a whole, allowing you to see exactly what’s going on.

Observing how consumers behave online will help you enhance your online presence, customer service, website design, and other aspects of your business. The customer journey in the digital world is similar to that of a physical customer, with a few notable differences.

Contact Centre Cloud Solutions offer Omnichannel support that covers every interaction

If you want to develop a fully linked experience, consider every channel, medium, and need that may arise. Customers will notice if you foresee their needs. People want (ok, expect) to be taken care of without having to ask, especially in today’s instant gratification society.

The collection and connection of all the numerous fragments of customer interaction that occur during the purchasing journey is a key component of Contact Centre Cloud Solutions. This collection will allow you to connect everything for a seamless digital experience from beginning to end.

Multiple touchpoints for engagement

People like having choices. They want things to be simple and accessible, and they want it now more than ever on their terms. True omnichannel support ensures that your clients can interact with your brand in any format and at any touchpoint, regardless of their requirements. The best thing a contemporary brand can do is give their audience the real impression that they are always there for them.

Automated Speech Recognition Solutions

Advances in technology have spoiled today’s market for the better. Automated Speech Recognition Solutions have paved the way for the next gen organisation to deploy artificial intelligence based services for their customers. Customers can still interact, resolve queries and issues by speaking to a Conversational IVR or an A.I. based Chatbot / voicebot. It is imperative to understand that a customer truly want what they want, and after years of shopping in the physical world, they have some expectations for not only the goods and services they receive, but also the support they receive where automated speech recognition solutions can be a pleasant surprise not only for organisations but for the customer as well. Using an omnichannel strategy would allow you to provide a seamless experience and a pleasant journey.

Customer Retention

People return for more because they feel like they’re collaborating with a brand that is genuinely accountable and supportive. Although some people would shop anywhere without giving it a second thought, many others take their options carefully and recall positive experiences, particularly good service. People may complete their journey but not return if you don’t provide solid, customised support during the entire customer journey. People feel loyal to a brand while they feel backed by it. That’s all there is to it.

Excellent Data Quality

Omnichannel contact centre solutions benefit your company in more ways than one. They strengthen the customer experience. They also make it easier to keep track of the customer, the overall experience, and the multiple touchpoints along the way. You should learn more about your prospective buyers, their issues, growing pains, and more. You can then use that data to solve problems ahead of time or improve the overall journey experience. People will send you more information – more precious information – if they feel like they can reach out to you. This aids future expansion.

Sustained trust and Loyalty

You hold your brand to a higher standard when you provide support in a variety of formats, or in this case, when you provide support in the capacity where your customer may need it. Customers will have more faith in your brand as a result of this. It also boosts your reputation with third-party sources like search engines, business critics, and third-party reviews. Not providing strong support might be interpreted as a lack of concern for the customer, or worse, as having something to hide – and, of course, we all want to help our customers the best we can! That’s where a well-thought-out omnichannel support system comes in handy.

Customer Satisfaction at its best

We’ve finally finished the circle. You increase overall customer satisfaction when you use a robust omnichannel contact centre solution like SlashRTC’s. If you’ve been paying attention in the contemporary business world, you’ve noticed that customer satisfaction is the single most important indicator of a company’s success. Many studies have shown that it is directly proportional to growth and stock value. As a result, if you want to create a brand that not only provides the perfect customer journey but also succeeds in the long run, you’ll need the right tools, including support across all channels and mediums.

Enhance Your Business Operations With Video Calling SDKs

The technology of video conferencing has proved to be a blessing to businesses amid the pandemic. While everyone continues to work remotely/from home, it has become more than important to stay in touch with clients, suppliers, internal teams, partners and customers. Video calling SDK aids businesses in maintaining and strengthening relations and keeping the prime entities of your business engaged.

The best thing about video conferencing is that you do not have to build a whole new system from scratch. You can easily integrate into your existing website or application. This not only saves your money and time, but also enhances your overall productivity.

These benefits of video calling SDK will make your business processes quick and easy to implement.

1. SDKs are ready and always quick to implement. Just merge with your systems and you’ll be free from WebRTC complexity right away. This makes it simpler for you to introduce your product. 

2. Video conferencing APIs or SDKs come with in-built security protocols which are much better and hassle-free from the compliance and security protocols of a whole new video conferencing technology. Since they are in-built, they get implemented exactly when the system is integrated. 

3. This technology is your way forward for business continuity during pandemic times. It ensures productivity, efficiency and at the same time, enables business operations. 

Video conferencing systems are also an integral part of contact centre solutions. These solutions are instrumental in enhancing the overall collaborative experience between you and your employees or you and your customers. Contact centre solutions also enable you to make the most out of enterprise-like abilities at competitive rates. In the present times, when you can easily lose/gain your customers, this integrated technology paves way for a one-of-a-kind customer journey that only has one result – your customer’s confidence in you. This is genius technology made convenient for your business growth which is the need of the hour.

Read more : How chat AI business Solutions can help automate Customer on-boarding

Conversational A.I. platforms is simply the best thing to happen to organisations

Conversational A.I. Platform is a canvas for organisations that helps them add features like voice bots, chatbots, Video Conferencing, social media and many other features to communicate with their customers over a single interface. The advantages of such features using a call centre software augurs in creating deep rooted and valuable relationships with customers. In the current era, enterprises across the globe are inclined towards such technologies and has been grabbing attention at a rapid rate.

Implementation of chatbot and conversational bots

While 2021 is soon going to be the year of paradigm shifts, a conversational A.I. bot will be able to decipher complex queries and also understand human sentiments further providing a more personalised experience for the customer. Chat bots are great for customers who wish to read and see more visual content for their reference while simultaneously resolving their issue.

Build your own conversations without a single line of code

A Call Centre software helps the client build his own customised conversations with a UI enabled conversation designer. This is a useful feature that an advanced Conversational A.I. platform provider can offer.

A.I. helps in better productivity

Having a dedicated virtual assistant designed for your customer service vertical helps resolve the common and mundane queries that your customers face frequently. This helps in saving the time of customer service agents and help them focus more on the core activities of their job.

No UI is the New Normal

With the advent of A.I. based interactions such as the google assistant, amazon’s alexa and microsoft’s cortana, the average consumer is gradually getting used to interacting with digital assistant and receiving an immediate useful response. The consumer no more requires an interface or a device to browse through options anymore.

The Multilingual Approach

The best way to get closer to a customer is to empathise and there is no better way to empathise than speaking to the customer using a local language. This creates a sudden sense of belonging and warmth in the mind of the customer. While digital assistants support multilingual capabilities so can chatbots and voicebots. This way your customer service agent need not know the language while the organisation can still leverage a potential customer from a different lingual background. 

The Way Forward

While the industry hasn’t achieved the full potential of Conversational A.I. technology, the proliferation of the same in 2021 is highly anticipated. Tough we haven’t not reached the pinnacle of the technology, whatever the industry is witnessing is still benefitting organisations by leaps and bounds in terms of profitability, manpower costs and training costs.

Read more : How To Make a shopping experience fantastic every shopping season for your customers using Contact Centre Solutions

The time to shift to new age contact centre solutions seems to have arrived sooner than we all thought!

2020 was a year of realisations. The pandemic induced large levels of panic amongst organisations to immediately gear up to the new way of working and adjusting to the new normal. Organisations had to make sure that hundreds and hundreds of customer service agents who could not travel to the office had to work from home or remotely. For organisations, the entire existing ecosystems had to be re-structured to accommodate this modern change.

contact centre solutions

It probably took a damaging pandemic that created losses and turmoil within thousands of businesses. However, it was a lesson well learned that organisation needed to make this shift irrespective of the pandemic if profitability and cost saving measures have always been the core of attention for each organisation that exists today.

The biggest requisition for organisations was for the fastest migration possible. Organisations did not want to lose business from customers. There was and still is a significant rush to adopt a robust contact centre solutions and while doing this, organisations just needed to have blind faith that these systems would work. Today, all organisations who made the move towards adopting call centre software are the ones benefitting with overall better streamlined operations, profitability, cost saving measures and excellent customer service support.

Consumers usually believe that one-on-one meetings are absolutely essential to handle queries from complex products or services. But through the introduction of Contact Centre Solutions, the discovery of Video Chat SDKs have created a phenomenal impact in the way an agent can service a customer. For instance, if there is a software that has a complex setup process or a financial product that a consumer purchases online, no more is a one on one meeting required. The Customer can directly head to the website, start a chat, a customer service agent will directly be mapped to the customer where the agent can take the customer through a complete visual walkthrough using screen share or a video call. Video Chat SDKs also help in reduced costs as setup costs are low and international call rates are no more a concern.

The recent pandemic has done nothing but pushed organisations to adopt to this kind of a technology which otherwise would have taken more than 5-6 years. The importance of Contact Centre Solutions has been greatly elevated and we are sure that this shift in paradigm is a reality and here to stay for good and probably evolve further.

Also Read : Why Text to Speech matters for Organisations and its Customers

How are Communications APIs and Conversational IVR integral to customer interaction?

Whether it’s B2C, B2B or C2C, every kind of business has their own lot of customers with whom they should a maintain a good relation. Afterall, customers are crucial to the growth of a company. As a business owner, have you ever wondered how you can better the quality of interaction you have with your customers? Two of the most effective solutions are Communications APIs and Conversational IVR. Keep reading to find how they can be beneficial.

Communications APIs and Conversational IVR

To reach monetary and creative heights, business take to Communications APIs since it provides a unique platform where a company can explore the usage of technology. Furthermore, there are different kind of Communication API one can integrate to their apps like voice call API, SMS API, MMS API and emergency call APIs.

With an aim to increase your business’s productivity and efficiency, SlashRTC offers communication APIs that are custom developed. Whether it’s through a WhatsApp message or something as simple as a traditional call, you can now easily leverage customer interaction to grow your business.

Today’s world is a fast moving one. Therefore, understandably so, people are in need of quick solutions that can reduce their hassle. That’s where Conversational IVR comes into the picture.

Conversational IVR is a solution that uses voice commands of customers to help customers with queries that are answered by a meticulously programmed bot. They’re similar to that of the role of the voice assistant you can find on your smart phone, powered by the respective software system.

The reason many companies prefer using Conversational IVRs is due to its time-efficiency. That is the reason SlashRTC boasts its own proprietary NLP and NLU engines powered by automated speech recognition (ASR). Here, you can find Slash bot that, with a human touch, interacts and perfectly understands the meaning and intent behind the conversation. In this manner, the customers remain engaged and is also assured a proper solution.

How far are you from becoming a true Next Gen Conversational Enterprise for your customers?

Has a thought ever crept in? What if your organisation could communicate and resolve queries from B2B and B2C customers at a click of a button? Imaginations are not exactly far from reality. How many Companies are aware that time sensitive tasks could be completed 3 times faster using automated / A.I. based conversations? The answer is ….A few. And even if Companies are aware of the same, the complacent attitude of ‘If it isn’t broken, why fix it’ still remains.

At the crux of the matter, Ever thought how powerful your enterprise would be if customer conversations could be automated & processed at scale?

Enterprises that believe in the power of contact centre solutions are the ones who have already embarked on a Journey to attain the best Customer Conversational experience, Profitability, Cost Saving and scalability. A Conversational ai platform is capable of providing a synchronous, automated, personalized and contextual conversations with customers irrespective of what time zone and location / geography they are in.

A Conversational ai platform is programmed to leverage NLP (Natural-Language Processing) and NLU (Natural Language Understanding) and accurately understands the Customer’s requirement or intent and responds naturally in a human like manner. The A.I. gradually understands the customer and keeps improving for even better accuracy and action processing. Customer conversations can be recorded, tracked and analysed in real-time and this helps guide Companies to make the most of Customer communications using contact center cloud solutions.

When Companies integrate with Contact Centres and include their processes and workloads with Artificial Intelligence. This is where they immediately become a customer-centric company and start witnessing operational stability and also witness long term cost saving benefits. Through this, Companies are assured of predictable growth and better insight into how happy their customers truly are.

Currently quite a few organisations are trying their hand at Conversational AI integration. However it is imperative for Companies to think of the multitude of ways in how they can leverage this technology to improve the other arms / verticals of their businesses. A Company that has started seeing the benefits of this technology, working well across most verticals of their business, is a Company that can be considered as a true Next Gen Conversational Enterprise.

Why Text to Speech matters for Organisations and its Customers

In our busy lives we have gotten used to being constantly on the move. In the midst of the fight for time, the consumer market has gotten used to automation on a complex and basic level as well. While driving, to have an assistant read out their directions, reading out their messages, telling users about the weather and traffic conditions, reading out their text messages and emails. Consumers from the comfort of their homes are also used to talking to their Digital Assistants while they sit on their couches or cook in the kitchen. The root of this functionality that makes it possible is an underlying text-to-speech solution embedded within the software that helps process human responses.

Below, we will also delve deeper into speech to text, and more.

Text to Speech has many applications like controlling your devices, having your website read out to you, having a text to speech bot to give you an update of your purchase on an e-commerce portal.

Organisations have understood the power of that tiny pie of time in the daily life of the customer and to make the most efficient use of the same. It has become imperative to turn to such text-to-speech solution to best leverage the time of the customer’s limited availability. Retaining a customer’s interest and providing solutions in the shortest turn-around times amongst a plethora of competitors in the market is the need of the hour for many organisations. An audio feedback disguised as a response augurs well within the mind of a loyal customer.

The main mechanism behind this technology is having an engine that converts speech into text, understand the intent using A.I., convert the response to Speech Again. This is the underlying mechanism of a text to speech bot just for the sake of basics.

Companies like SlashRTC have successfully created a comprehensive, scalable, enterprise-enabled Text-to-Speech solution. SlashRTC enables intelligent methodologies to help organisation adopt self-servicing capabilities with variations in complexities for organizations of all kinds. SlashRTC’s have worked at the apex to deliver a bespoke contact center experience by enabling an above average human-like & a more personalized customer centric conversation via their proprietary text-to-speech solutions.