Customer care is the single most important aspect of any business. According to Sam Walton, the goal of a business is to have customer service that is not just the best but that is legendary.
While customer service once was solely a problem-solving entity, now it is the central hub for all of your marketing communication and customer interactions. Maintaining a legendary customer contact center has many challenges, but the cloud provides some advantages for smaller businesses that still want Fortune 500-level customer care.
Know the Cost of Living in the Cloud
The capital outlay for hosting a customer contact center on-premises can be costly. Servers and software are in the range of $50,000 for a 50-agent center, which is simultaneously too big for a newly expanding business but the minimum amount based on cost consideration. Getting anything smaller would become obsolete before you paid it off. On top of this price, you would need to hire at least one IT staff member at around $80,000 annually, plus benefits. All of the hardware costs are capital expenditures that you would need to pay up front, and this money would either need to be taken from savings or leveraged with a loan.
Cloud-based contact centers like Zipwire do not have these issues. They own the servers and have the staff to maintain them. All you do is pay your monthly membership. Annually, cloud-based customer contact centers cost around half that those located on business premises do — and with fewer IT nightmares.
Pay for What You Need
Most cloud-based customer care center services have a scalable membership option, which allows you to pay for only what you use. This is good if your business is still expanding into a robust customer contact center. Until it is established and you have some time to create a track record, it can be difficult to calculate how many labor hours you will need for the department.
Even virtual processing hours will eventually need to be calculated. Going into this project, you will only be able to make educated guesses. Without using a scalable platform, a bad guess can have you paying for space that you do not use. Even worse, underestimating your needs can leave your customers without a means to contact you. Until you know these numbers and have an idea of how they fluctuate, use a scalable system.
Integrate Your Analytics and Marketing
There has been a shift in the way that businesses operate in the last decade. Companies have moved from being operations-based and seeing customer service as a department to being customer-based and integrating all aspects of the company into customer care.
Cloud-based customer care centers allow you to easily blend customer service, social media, and corporate social responsibility into one holistic marketing message. Because cloud centers are, by definition, located in a virtual world, it is easy to link digital channels across all of your marketing methods. It also places the interaction between your company and your customers at the center of all of your business practices, which is exactly where you want your customer care to be.
