Traversing the Contact Centre Landscape: On-premises vs. Cloud Contact Centre Solution

As leaders of growing businesses, you might find yourself often relying heavily on customer facing teams to maintain a high level of customer satisfaction. But are you equipping them with the right solution to do justice to your business and customers alike?  

Let’s look at this from lens of a new-age bank. Your bank has recently introduced a slew of new fintech solutions, which has resulted in expanding its market reach, you find that your customer support team is struggling to keep up with the enquiries, demands, and feedback from your expanding customer base, leading to delayed responses, agent burnouts, inefficient customer service, and ultimately poor customer experience.  

In today's fast-paced world, customers expect instant gratification, and any delays or inefficiencies in customer service can hurt your business’s reputation.  

Engaging with customers without the right strategy and solution to back you up is like participating in elocution content without preparing the speech. You are bound to stutter and fail.  

But fret not. Today’s blog post is aimed to guide your business towards seamless digital transformation by identifying the right contact centre solution to help you stay ahead of the curve in the rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Types of Contact Centres

As you consider upgrading your contact centre solution to meet the needs of your growing business, it's essential to understand the two primary types of contact centre solutions: on-premises and cloud contact centres.‍

1. On-premises Contact Centre Solution

An on-premises contact centre solution requires businesses to install and maintain the hardware and software components physically, within the business premises. The responsibility for managing, updating, and securing the solution lies with your internal IT team. On-premises solutions often require significant upfront investments in equipment, software licenses, and dedicated IT staff.

2. Cloud Contact Centre Solution

A cloud contact centre solution, on the other hand, is hosted on remote servers and accessed through internet. The hardware, software, and infrastructure are managed by a third-party service provider, eliminating the need for in-house maintenance, and reducing upfront costs. This type of solution is increasingly popular due to its flexibility, scalability, and ability to integrate with other cloud tools and apps. Cloud contact centres enable businesses to adapt quickly to changing market conditions and deliver exceptional customer experiences, regardless of their size or industry.

TL; DR

If your business values absolute control over its contact centre infrastructure and is willing to invest in the necessary resources to maintain and secure an on-premises solution, then an on-premises contact centre may be the right choice for you. However, if you're looking for a solution that offers greater flexibility, scalability, and lower upfront costs, a cloud contact centre solution is likely the better option.

Difference Between On-premises and Cloud Contact Centre

To better understand the differences between on-premises and cloud contact centre solutions, let’s compare them across various criteria.

Let’s revisit the previous Banking scenario to understand the difference in capabilities of the two solutions.

Let’s imagine that the new-age bank has introduced ‘pre-approved, one-click personal loans’ for its existing customers as part of its digital transformation strategy. But it starts experiencing several challenges:

• Customers have bombarded the bank’s call centre and flooded the email support inbox with enquiries on the disbursement process and other related questions, quickly overwhelming the support team.
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• Remote work has become alluring proposition to hire support staffs, but the on-premises solution is making it difficult for customer support agents to work remotely without compromising security and performance.
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• The bank's leadership team requires advanced analytics to understand customer feedback for the new product, but the on-premises solution offers limited built-in analytics capabilities.
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• Integrating new tools and services with the on-premises system is becoming increasingly complex and costly for the IT team.

To overcome these challenges, the bank decides to transition to a cloud contact centre solution. This move allows the bank to:

• Open more channels of communication for the customers, while equipping their customer support team with a unified dashboard that acts as a hub for all customer touchpoints without needing them to jump between various channels.
  
• Empower its customer support agents to work remotely without compromising on security or performance. Thus, enhancing employee experience in the process.
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• Gain access to real-time data insights and analytics capabilities to drive better decision-making.
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• Seamlessly integrate with other cloud tools and services, enhancing the overall customer experience.

Advantages of Cloud Contact Centre Solution

Switching to a cloud contact centre solution offers numerous benefits for businesses, especially those looking to keep up with the evolving digital landscape. Here are some key advantages of cloud contact centre solutions:

Cost Savings

One of the most significant benefits of cloud contact centre solutions is the potential for cost savings. By eliminating the need for costly hardware, in-house IT support, and reducing the cost of licenses per usage, businesses can reduce their upfront investment and ongoing maintenance costs. Additionally, cloud contact centres typically operate on a subscription-based pricing model, allowing businesses to pay for only the services they need.

Scalability and Flexibility

Cloud contact centre solutions provide greater scalability and flexibility, enabling businesses to quickly adapt to evolving market conditions and customer demands. They allow you to easily add or remove agent seats, manage your support hours, access new features and functionality, and provide localised support as your business evolves. This agility can give your business a competitive edge in a fast-paced digital world.

Enhanced Customer Experience

By leveraging advanced analytics and integration capabilities, cloud contact centre solutions enable businesses to proactively deliver personalised, omnichannel customer experiences. Agents have a unified view of customer interactions across various touchpoints, which helps them better understand customer needs and provide more tailored support. Cloud contact centre solutions also enhance workforce productivity by automating mundane tasks, and empowering customers to seek resolution to common enquiries y deploying AI-powered chatbots.

Improved Agent Experience

Cloud contact centre solutions offer remote work capabilities, enabling agents to access the contact centre solution’s dashboard from any location with an internet connection. This flexibility can lead to increased employee satisfaction, reduced turnover, and improved performance. Additionally, cloud contact centre solutions also integrate seamlessly with other tools and apps frequently used by your teams to enhance collaboration and streamline workflows, further improving the agent experience.

Robust Security and Compliance

Security and compliance are critical concerns for any business, especially those in highly regulated industries like financial services, hospitality, real-estate, and e-commerce. Cloud contact centre solution providers typically ensure their platforms meet or exceed industry security standards and employ state-of-the-art data encryption, data backup and recovery, and data protection systems that always safeguard businesses and customers.

How CINNOX Can Help you Keep Up with the Evolving Digital Business Landscape

CINNOX helps new-gen businesses to revolutionise their processes by unifying the power of people, data, AI, systems, and touchpoints to create a single ecosystem of connected experiences for customers and teams, empowering our clients to stay ahead in the ever-evolving digital business landscape.‍

1. All-in-One Platform

CINNOX converges all customer touchpoints into one easy-to-use, unified platform, ensuring a consistent and seamless customer experience across channels such as voice, video, chat, email, and social media among others.

2. Integrated Ecosystem

CINNOX combines people, data, AI, systems, and touchpoints into a single, seamless interface. This unification allows for streamlined workflows, enhanced collaboration among teams, and a more efficient exchange of information. By breaking down siloed practices, our solution provides integrated ecosystem to improve both customer and employee experiences, leading to increased satisfaction, loyalty, and business growth.

3. Team Collaboration

CINNOX makes it easy for your customer support agents to collaborate with cross-functional teams on one unified dashboard, enabling faster enquiry resolution and a more streamlined experience for your customers.

4. Real-time Data Visibility

CINNOX breaks down data silos by providing complete visibility into customer journeys, their needs, preferences, and motivation. By connecting CINNOX with other existing business tools, you also stand to gain a comprehensive view of customer data that can empower your team to make data-backed, informed decisions to improve customer satisfaction and drive business growth.

5. Automation

CINNOX's AI-powered chatbot helps streamline self-service options for customers and reduce manual efforts for your teams, freeing up valuable time for your agents to focus on higher-value tasks.

6. Localised Support

CINNOX equips businesses with the right capabilities like smart routing, real-time chat monitoring, and real-time performance tracking and analysis, among others to engage customers around the globe while operating from a single location, ensuring a consistent and personalised experience for customers, regardless of their geographic location.

7. Security and Compliance

CINNOX is designed to meet the highest security standards and compliance requirements, allowing you to focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences with confidence.