How Cloud “Solutions” Put You on TOP of the Customer Experience Game
In this age of cloud, today’s leading solution providers are helping customers transform the customer experience. However, those considering moving their contact center to the cloud should know there is an important distinction between cloud providers… and cloud solution providers.
Many cloud providers stop at selling general benefits of the cloud: increased flexibility, faster deployment time, lower initial capital investment and reduced IT requirements. These are all great and legit, but aren’t we past that? The cloud is here to stay and brings with it some real advantages. Sold!
Today’s leading solution providers take it a step further… They take the time to truly understand your business and prescribe and administer specific solutions that enhance the customer experience. They apply learnings from thousands of deployments and tap into expertise resident in organizations filled with folks recognized as industry authorities in their respective disciplines. The result? You get access to industry leading technologies, organizations (people) and processes that help you get the most out of your investment and delight your customers.
Technology
Most cloud providers have basic ACD, IVR and Unified Communications (News - Alert) functionality. However, comprehensive solution providers offer a much broader set of functionality with the latest applications, tools and capabilities built right into the core platform – things such as real-time speech analytics, multichannel routing and recording (voice, e-mail, chat, and social media), mobility, automatic speech recognition, business process automation, and the like. They offer flexibility in how technology is deployed and the ability to integrate with existing systems and to customize applications. From a functionality standpoint, true solution providers allow you to do everything in the cloud you’re used to on-premises, sometimes more.
While this level of functionality and flexibility is critical, solution providers’ secret sauce is the ability to prescribe best practices for configuring, deploying and administering technology. This is based on many years of experience helping others solve similar problems and achieve similar goals. You aren’t starting from scratch. That brings us to what really separates regular providers from true solution providers – organization (people) and process.
Organization (People)
Solution providers bring the best people to the job. The best sales engineers, the best consultants, the best implementers, the best trainers, the best services teams, the best support engineers, the best technical operations teams, the best network engineers, the best security and compliance professionals, the best developers – the best contact center experts. Delivering contact center technology and services is their single focus, day in and day out, and that’s not new. These are the people who will join your team. Take time to get to know them. They are what you are truly investing in when moving to the cloud and will have a major impact on your ability to enhance the customer experience.
Process
Solution providers ensure their people follow best practices and processes for managing all aspects of the solution lifecycle – deployment, support, application upgrades/updates, change management, keeping dependent platforms and networks up-to-date and operational, keeping the environment secure, etc. For example, best practices are prescribed for defining, designing and implementing call flows, routing routines, IVR menus, business and service processes (mapping), etc. You get the point. These proven, time-tested processes are critical to enhancing the customer experience.
There are few times a company has the opportunity to make fundamental changes to their contact center. Your move to the cloud could present the perfect opportunity to do just that. Look for a cloud solution provider that brings the best technology, organization (people) and processes to your team so you can be on TOP of your customer experience game.
Visit www.inin.com to learn more about our cloud-based solutions for your business.
Jason Alley is solutions marketing manager at Interactive Intelligence (News 
- Alert).
Edited by Stefania Viscusi
