Cloud within a cloud

In a sense, contact centres are a type of cloud - because, even when they're not outsourced, they provide a standalone, very specific, remote service to an organisation, often measured on a pay per use basis, in terms of 'managing' the organisation's customers.

The end game of all this is an entirely virtual contact centre.

Evan Jones is business development manager at Merchants.

From the customer's point of view, accessing a contact centre is very similar to accessing Facebook, or YouTube, which are the cloud services to which consumers most readily relate.

So, without realising it, organisations with contact centres have taken their first step into the cloud. And, of course, in this simplified context, outsourcing the contact centre is another step deeper into the cloud.

However, while that initial move into the cloud has been delivering value by cutting the cost of interacting with customers, it's becoming obvious now that the ultimate value of a contact centre can be achieved only when the contact centre itself is taken into the cloud. That is, when it becomes a cloud within a cloud, and thereby, not only reduces costs, but also massively enhances an organisation's ability to continuously enrich the customer experience.

To some extent, taking the contact centre into the cloud is going to be forced on organisations because of the need to move to IP-based technologies. The 2011 Dimension Data Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Survey shows that, of the 546 contact centres in 66 countries that were surveyed, over 50% have deployed IP telephony. In addition, the numbers of contact centres planning upgrades indicate that IP is now the default choice.

For the moment, however, their reasons for wanting to go the IP route are fairly basic and focused on internal operations - including the fact that IP provides them with a more reliable, more flexible, and more cost-effective infrastructure.

Organisations are also responding to the external pressure of customers starting to prefer using the social media - or social media mechanisms, such as Web chat - as channels through which to contact organisations. As a consequence, enterprises urgently have to find a way to integrate their legacy telephony-based systems with newer technologies and develop multi-channel capabilities.

At the same time, they're finding it makes no sense to either limit their costly but immensely valuable management information systems (MIS) to the contact centre, or exclude the contact centre from the organisation's MIS. In fact, more and more, organisations are realising that having their contact centre agents make more extensive and better use of MIS is one way of cutting operational costs while improving customer satisfaction.

In other words, MIS is triggering the realisation that it is both counter-intuitive and counter-productive to impose boundaries on the information that technology delivers. Why not link the company's multi-channel capabilities to the MIS, so the contact centre agents become knowledge workers and the knowledge workers function as contact centre agents (or service specialists, as they're becoming known) when it is relevant to do so?

To achieve this, however, it is necessary to integrate the contact centre's technologies with those in the rest of the organisation.

Clearly, upgrading to IP-based technology makes achieving multi-channel capabilities as well extending the knowledge worker and service specialist base easier. But, there's so much more to do - and so many more benefits to obtain by taking the contact centre itself into the cloud.

The extended benefits of migrating to an IP platform kick in immediately, because all the software as a service (SaaS) options open up. Instead of having to buy, implement, manage, and maintain contact centre-specific applications such as workforce management optimisation, customer statistical analysis, and call recording analysis that help companies make the contact centre more efficient, they can simply buy them from the cloud - and pay only for what they use.

The end game of all this is, of course, an entirely virtual contact centre - with contact centre technology as a service, in which everything that is needed to manage a contact centre is available from the cloud.

There's an extremely big 'but', though. What the cloud won't be able to deliver - at least not easily and not in the near future - is the consultative ability to tailor a contact centre to meet an organisation's specific customer management needs. Quite apart from the fact that customer management is still a very new business discipline in the contact centre domain, contact centres are not and should not be one size fits all. The services delivered and the processes used to deliver them must be tailored to most cost-effectively and efficiently address not only customer contact needs, but the enterprise's branding and marketing needs. And, of course, agent training is usually pretty specific.

So, while there's more than enough technology commonality to enable one to buy most of what one needs off a cloud shopping list, the ultimate purpose of contact centres is to ensure good human relationships. That can't be left to a pure cloud provider. For that, one still needs the benefit of the insight, experience, and innovation capabilities of customer management specialists.

No doubt the best of both worlds will be available, with some consulting and solutions providers also being global enough to offer customer organisations best practice on both the human and technology level.

For the moment, however, there's quite enough to be done by just moving the non-IP based contact centre into rather more of the cloud than it currently occupies.