Supporting Customer Journeys and Your Business with a Cloud Contact Center ebook
COMPANIES ARE ACCELERATING MOVEMENT Contact Center Applications Are Going to the Cloud Frost & Sullivan / Sept 2014 Report In Adding Value and Managing Change in Today s Contact Center, the analyst firm found that annual revenues from cloud solutions have already exceeded on-premises contact center solution sales. They forecast that hosted solutions in North America will climb from $2 billion in 2013 to $3.4 billion in 2018, at an 11.4% CAGR. They also found the movement from on-premises applications fairly distributed across industry verticals, with a high adoption rate in industries such as financial services and healthcare. To Frost & Sullivan, this validates the maturity of the Cloud model and supports the case for its robustness. HOSTED SOLUTIONS
CLOUD ENABLES INCREASED RESPONSIVENESS Differentiate by Serving Customers Better Those companies who focus on end-toend journeys build significant competitive advantage, reduce customer churn, and differentiate their brand from competitors seeking to take those customers away. Supporting customers across the multiple touchpoints of purchase, onboarding, account management and issue resolution journeys requires a rich platform of capabilities. It means connecting with customers through your website, on their mobile devices, from your contact center and back office with personalized, assisted service. To accomplish this, your organization must track and share a single view of the customer to deliver consistent and contextually aware experiences across all channels without customers ever having to repeat themselves. This increased level of responsiveness also demands constant availability (uptime), low customer effort (integrated systems), and maximum trust (security).
CAVEATS AND CONSIDERATIONS Numerous Benefits Realized Through a Cloud-Based Contact Center First-Address Questions: 1 How do you maintain business continuity when your enterprise applications are hosted in the Cloud? 2 What cost savings are you likely to realize 3 How can you maximize flexibility and agility 4 How do you manage security and compliance? through a cloud-based model? for your business, as needs change? Moving systems from on-premises to cloud deployment requires several considerations to ensure that, in all cases, your business continues to operate as designed, and is able to respond to changing requirements. Disaster recovery, data security, and the flexibility to adapt to a shifting business climate are paramount when considering contact center technologies and solution providers.
BUSINESS CONTINUITY Competitors Are One Click Away Contact Centers Are Complex Environments The technologies and multiple integrated systems involved in today s modern contact center are designed to maintain loyalty and renewals by simultaneously supporting both customer service and online sales efforts. The impact to loyalty and the cost of disaster-caused downtime is significant, when you consider lost agent productivity and damaged customer value. The hidden costs of downtime can include loss of your competitive advantage and the related long-term effects to your brand. Competitive Pressures Never Cease If your contact center is unavailable or incapable of handling customer needs for whatever reason and a competitor is available instead chances are often good customers will choose an alternative. In today s environment, your customers move to a competitor is only one click away. The customer s perception is your reality. Kate Zabriskie, in Forbes Magazine
GEOGRAPHIC DISASTER RECOVERY Enhanced Through Cloud Deployment Global, Cloud-Based Solutions Hosting Should Span Multiple Regions Maintaining instances of your contact center technology in multiple data centers provides geographic diversity meeting your business continuity needs. Spanning data centers in distributed regions provides high availability (HA) of all critical components. Core HA functionality is maintained through hosting your contact center applications in at least two different regions. Choose a solution provider who maintains: Data center pairs in all global regions, including the Americas, EMEA and APAC Ensure that no single point of failure exists in the architecture, and that auto-failover of individual elements is part of the implementation Insist on a 99.99% uptime SLA Maintain strict access control policies, including role-based physical restrictions, environment logging and periodic audits, to protect both security and privacy
COST JUSTIFICATION FOR A CLOUD CONTACT CENTER Significant Financial Benefits There are several primary cost justifications for growing your business through a contact center hosted in the cloud versus deploying capabilities on-premises: Faster Time to Value: Adding capabilities especially those with the potential to generate revenue are up and running sooner in a cloud contact center. Supporting new digital channels is the perfect place to start. 1 No Capital Expenditure (CAPEX): Rather than procuring new equipment, software and people to support growing on-premises systems, a cloud deployment lets you pay as you grow. 2 Assured Return on Investment (ROI): Match the costs to scale and new capabilities with the volume of customers you are servicing and supporting. This provides a clear path to return-on-investment for your contact center modernization and expansion efforts.
MAXIMIZING FLEXIBILITY AND AGILITY Enterprises Focused on Innovation Nimble Operations Midsize companies represent the healthiest sector of the economy, responsible for almost half of global job growth1. While your growing enterprise is focused on innovation, you must also keep your operations nimble being very responsive to customer needs. Delivering great CX across customer journeys requires the agility offered by the Cloud companies gain that agility by: Supporting newly mobile customers with a distributed workforce: It is fast becoming a cloud-first, mobile-first world. Studies show that 90% of your customers are now likely to be on a smartphone when they reach out to you. And thanks to cloud-based applications and IP telephony, your workers can be distributed globally even working from home. Maximizing time-to-value as new Gartner estimates that 45% of workers today in the United States work outside of the traditional office some portion of the week and that contact center infrastructures are best deployed as multichannel suites. capabilities are added: New features can be trialed or implemented almost immediately. And cloud-based deployment enables you to size contact center up or down as needed to address seasonal volume and load fluctuation based on bursts of activity, such as special promotions or campaigns. Deloitte and Gartner 1
IMPROVING EFFICIENCIES Enterprises Focused on Profitability Automating the Back Office While Enhancing Workforce Quality Workforce management capabilities, agent monitoring, and coaching tools help you administer workload distribution and train employees. Based on the kinds of inquiries and issues which come in to your contact center, you are able to continuously improve the quality of customer interactions. Remember, touchpoints can involve voice, web, social, mobile or other channels, so driving greater satisfaction and loyalty means giving customers connection choices. Molding more effective employees through coaching keeps them happy as well, and helps you retain the human resources most likely able to help you grow your business. Stay Ahead of Advancing Technology Constantly upgrading systems takes planning, people and process. With your contact center in the Cloud, you never have to worry about updates, security patches or upgrading technology. Make sure that your solution provider keeps everything up to date for you automatically, and as needed on a recurring basis.
SECURITY AND COMPLIANCE MANAGEMENT Protecting Data, Privacy and Trust Insist on Top Industry Certifications The security of cloud services provided is critical to continuously delivering great experiences to your customers. It is also instrumental in protecting the trust they have placed in you for preserving the integrity any personal, transactional or confidential information. Choose a solution provider who has earned a wide portfolio of security certifications and maintains data protection standards, including: PCI DSS 3.0 Level 1: The highest level of Data Security Standards by the Payment Card Industry SOC 2 Type II: Certifying the operating effectiveness of a Service Organization s Controls HIPAA Compliance: Compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the standard for protecting sensitive health data US-EU Safe Harbor Registered: Certifies adherence to the framework developed by the Department of Commerce in coordination with the European Commission
SUMMARY Flexible Capabilities and Financial Rewards Deploying your contact center in the Cloud provides you with significant benefits, both in added capabilities and in new efficiencies, to increase the caliber of your customer experience. Responding to customers using multiple channels and new channel features puts pressure on you to maximize the time-to-value of contact center enhancements. Yet, the ability to quickly modernize without capital expenditures in hardware, software and people means that your costs vary only as needed, to support your present levels of business. It is important to pick the right solution provider based on some critical considerations. These include ensuring business continuity, the ability to maximize business agility as you grow and needs change and by supporting the requirements for maximum security and regulatory compliance.
CLOUD SOLUTIONS THAT ACCELERATE TIME TO VALUE & NEW REVENUE WITH A FULL SPECTRUM OF CLOUD SERVICES, UNLEASHING THE POWER OF EXCEPTIONAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES As the leading contact center provider in the Cloud, with thousands of customers, industry-leading certifications and a global footprint of high availability data centers, Genesys has proven success across numerous industries and a wide variety of customer segments. Learn More Watch a Video Get Started
Website: Contact Us: 1-888-GENESYS Genesys is the market leader in multi-channel customer experience (CX) and contact center solutions in the cloud and on-premises. We help brands of all sizes make great CX great business. The Genesys Customer Experience Platform powers optimal customer journeys consistently across all touchpoints, channels and interactions to turn customers into brand advocates. Genesys is trusted by over 4,500 customers in 80 countries to orchestrate more than 100 million digital and voice interactions each day. Copyright 2014 Genesys. 2001 Junipero Serra Blvd., Daly City, CA 94014 All Rights reserved. Genesys and the Genesys logo are registered trademarks of Genesys. All other company names and logos may be registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies.