As more and more businesses downsize in an effort to reduce their overhead costs for things like personnel and rent, the idea of having a call center solution in the cloud becomes attractive. A virtual call center can cut the unnecessary fat that may be holding your company back, boosting communication and trust between your company and its customers. In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the essential considerations you need to keep in mind as you look into signing up for a cloud-based contact center.
Is it Right for My Business Needs?
Let’s face it; not all businesses need a Facebook page. In the same manner, you may not need a full-fledged virtually hosted contact center. Adding this may complicate your communication channels and lead to lost man hours as you try to keep up with changing software and security needs.
If you are bent on having a hosted call center, consider:
- The installation cost
- How scalable it is
- Maintenance in the long run, time and money-wise.
Experience Handling Similar Businesses
Businesses are unique entities, and the best virtual call center service providers know this. Before picking one, ask them about their experience handling call center needs of companies such as yours, the number of years they’ve been in operation, examples of how they’ve been able to turn around business communication operations for other companies and hypothetical problems and solutions they may have for you going forward.
What’s in The Package?
Handling calls and routing them to the right department’s all well and good, but what else does the hosted call center solution have under its sleeve? Having a plethora of additional features can make a big difference, so please ask about whether they have call recording, computer telephony integration, interactive voice response, multichannel support, real-time call monitoring, priority call routing, workforce management and more. Having a bundled service that contains all these extra features can help increase business communication efficiency and bring in more money for your company in the long run.
Reliability and Availability
One of the worst things that can happen to any business is to be cut off from all communications. Instead of playing Russian roulette with hosted call center companies, ask them for documentation proving their excellent uptime as well as their system availability data. Better still, sign a Service Level Agreement that will keep them on their toes with regard to service delivery.
Whichever cloud-based contact center you decide to go with, make sure to leave no stone unturned when it comes to asking all the right questions, doing extensive research and asking for documentary/data evidence to support the service’s claims.
