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COVID-19 pandemic has been an eye-opener for contact centers, who were hesitant to migrate to the Cloud from their legacy on-premises technologies for any reason! They were ill-prepared to deal with a global crisis at this scale with no business continuity plan in place.

Without remote functionalities necessary for their agents and supervisors to urgently shift to a new work-from-home model and maintain business continuity during lockdowns, they struggled to put together all essential services to support the customers.

The result? Unable to react to a significant and sudden increase in call volumes, they eventually stumbled upon an inevitable consequence of losing customers and, quite possibly, their business and reputation.

This comes as no surprise as more and more businesses are discovering that the cloud contact center is the only future-proof solution that can help them keep pace with today’s changing business landscape.

Major companies have already forsaken the old, in-house legacy systems, realizing that cloud solutions can not only offer the affordability, reliability, efficiency, scalability, and multichannel capabilities they want but feature the agility and flexibility needed for any unprecedented circumstances to keep up with the shifting market and customer behaviors.

As we know, cloud contact center solutions come with many benefits that can drive digital disruption in customer experience (CX). They are:

Quick Deployment: For companies using premise-based contact center systems, it can take weeks—or even months—to deploy new sales tools and capabilities. With a cloud contact center, you can deploy new tools on the fly. No requirements for new hardware, just a few clicks, and the deployment time only takes a matter of hours.

Easy Scalability: Unlike legacy solutions that require voice modules, additional software licenses, and other add-ons, cloud solutions allow you to instantly scale up or down, depending on the workforce or seasonal spikes.

Better integrations: Cloud enables deployment of ready-to-go IP contact centers and next-generation applications such as computer-telephony integration (CTI). In addition to standard Contact Center applications, it is also easy to integrate other types of applications such as skills-based routing, call recording, interactive voice response (IVR), workforce management (WFM), voicemail (VM), screen pop (CRM integrated) and soft client application.

Reliability and high availability: There was a misconception that premise-based contact center systems could offer greater reliability than hosted solutions. But COVID-19 has proved otherwise. Today’s enterprise-class cloud contact center solutions provide the highest availability, reliability, and disaster recovery.

Business Continuity: The Cloud is immune to any disasters that on-premise contact centers can suffer from. All the customer data is safe, and agents can work remotely. This is also why businesses are opting for Cloud as it provides better effective DR (Disaster Recovery) and BC (Business Continuity) measures.

Reduced costs: Cloud Contact Center costs less than in-house contact centers since it allows you to downsize unused cloud resources and free up storage & network and plan the cloud inventory to the bare minimum, which is required to run the business.

However, even with all the benefits, the major concern about adopting cloud-based solutions is security. A secure cloud computing environment depends on several security solutions working harmoniously together. Therefore, in the next sections, we will discuss some of the best practices to ensure Cloud Contact Center Security.

  • Choose Cloud Contact Centers that are designed for maximum security and updated.
  • Ensure that contact center staff are using the latest technology to engage with customers and that all staff is in the know about both security and technology updates.
  • Ensure agents adhere to security guidelines while engaging with customers, thereby protecting the customer details at all times
  • Follow a solid security strategy that involves a multiple-authentication process, access management, heavy encryption along with Data Loss Prevention (DLP) software to achieve security for stationary data.
  • Automate security configurations for third-party tools for protection and compliance
  • Encrypt all communication between cloud-hosted apps and thin clients.
  • Set up role-based logins for agents and managers to ensure the right data.
  • Create individual credentials for each user and restrict access only to the concerned groups with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
  • Set up a secure firewall between the VoIP server and the outside network.
  • Limited control for access and auditing process, along with the responsibility to control it, should belong to the Cloud Contact Center.
  • Automated periodic change of keys can help to mitigate risks with the login process.
  • A multi-tiered architecture and network segmentation along with a virtual firewall to allow or block communication packages
  • With integrated Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM) tools, rigorous tests should be carried out to remove vulnerabilities to ensure Cloud Contact Center Security.

Cloud Contact Center is obviously a much safer option than on-premise Contact Centers when governed with regulatory compliance and high-security protocols. By partnering with the right service provider like Servion, businesses can improve customer satisfaction and modernize the customer experience offering.

Do you want to know how Servion can help you put your customer experience at the forefront of crisis mitigation? Talk to our CX specialist today.