Earlier this year, many businesses, including contact centres, moved their staff home in a matter of weeks. Without Covid 19, most organizations would have taken years to achieve this. By the 22nd April 2020, “Call Centre Helper Magazine” reported that 73% of UK contact centres had more than 75% of their staff working from home.
From the technical perspective, businesses on the Cloud made the move relatively easily. Anyone using Cloud solutions is effectively a “remote worker”, since Cloud systems, such as Amazon Connect and associated applications such as agent desktops for Amazon Connect, are installed on hardware in a Cloud provider’s data centre, not on the company’s premises.
Why “on-prem” solutions were not so fastChallenges for on premises technology included getting everyone working from home through a VPN. Some home broadband providers didn’t support VPNs. Some companies had to buy many extra VPN licences. Some on premises telephony platforms could not route calls and CRM data to agents’ homes easily.
Cloud contact centres – the benefitsCloud may be the best way to address these issues in the future. Many regard a “second wave” as inevitable.
Staff at home can log on to a cloud contact centre just as they log in at work. The interfaces and the features are exactly the same. Cloud solutions usually come with detailed audit logs tracking how agents use the systems and work with sensitive data.
As volumes grow and shrink throughout the day, agents can be added or removed without any fear of running out of seats, or office space, or of seats and equipment standing idle but costing money during slack periods. Cloud contact centre providers usually charge users by minutes used, so optimizing costs.
Francis Dinha, the CEO and Co-Founder of Open VPN Inc, recently described Cloud in Forbes Magazine as: “a powerful game-changer for companies of all sizes; it made growth and scaling far more accessible, not to mention remote access.”
If your organization has an on-premises solution, perhaps it is time to look into Cloud, you might see there is a silver lining after all.
OMNINGAGE Connect is a Cloud based agent desktop for Amazon Connect delivering high quality voice. Its user friendly, data-rich UI promotes agent engagement with its dashboards for Amazon Connect and boosts productivity for those working in the office or at home.