When it comes to establishing a customer service department for your business, the best option is setting up a call center. Call centers can process both inbound and outbound calls, provide the fastest assistance for your customers, gather and analyze data received from your clients, and generate sales during cold calling campaigns.
Nonetheless, it is not that easy to set up a call center considering the variety of options available on the market.
Call centers differ by many criteria: cloud call centers and on-premises call centers, blended call centers, inbound call centers and outbound call centers, hosted call centers and virtual call centers, outsourced call centers, and so on.
But today’s topic is about cloud call centers as they are the most advanced solutions on the market because of the technology that is used in them. Anyhow, we need to prove this.
What are the different types of call centers ?
As we have already mentioned, there are different types of call centers and there are a few types of classification.
Inbound and Outbound call centers
Inbound call center is a call center that processes incoming calls only, while outbound call center processes only outbound calls. Inbound call centers are focused on providing customer service, while outbound call centers are more focused on sales, lead generation, and collecting customer feedback. The mixed type of these both is called a blended call center that means it processes both inbound and outbound calls at the same time.
Own call center and outsourced call center
As you could guess, the dissimilarity between these two types of call center lies in a location, management and ownership. An Outsourced call center is a call center that is already created, set up and equipped with all needed equipment and employees, including call center agents and call center managers, and you can just pay for its service. This is a solution for those who don’t want to spend time and need the customer service department here and now. Many business owners also look for outsourced solutions because such call centers are often located in countries where salaries are lower than in the western countries, so renting such a call center will be much cheaper than hiring employees somewhere in the US, for example. On the other hand, your own call center can become much more efficient and show much better performance because all the processes will be under your personal control.
On-premises call center and cloud call center
On-premises call center is a kind of infrastructure location for your call center where all the hardware is purchased, maintained, and set up in your own office, and surely, you also pay for it.
Cloud call center has its infrastructure located in the cloud, so there is no need to purchase any hardware or to maintain it because this responsibility is the responsibility of the service provider. Also, the process of the setup is much faster than in the case of an on premises call center. As you could guess, the solution is much cheaper on the stage of setting up.
Virtual call center and hosted call center are synonymous to cloud call center and refer us to its nature as it is, the solution totally located in the cloud.
So why do you need a cloud-based solution?
Benefits of cloud call center
Lower operational costs
As we have already mentioned, in the case of a cloud call center, you don’t pay for any hardware, it’s maintenance and setup, as well as you don’t pay for the IT team that will maintain your on premises solution. Another fact is that you have to pay for rental costs because you have to store your hardware somewhere.
In the case of a cloud solution, you can even run your call center as a remote call center because the only thing you have to get it all set is a stable Internet connection and laptop.
Omnichannel accessibility
In the modern world, you have to cover all communication channels, especially when we are talking about digital communication channels. Such digital channels include live chats, social media, emails, video calls, and so on. All of this digital
channels can be easily covered by the capability of a cloud call center. You can manage all the communication channels in one tab and let your agents respond to emails, chats, and calls from the one single interface. The same way it works with outgoing emails , calls or messages.
Better data security
Even though you might think that an on-premises solution will be better in the case of data security, it is not right. Cloud call centers store all of the data in the cloud on the servers of the best providers in the world and this eliminates the chance of losing data or being hacked. And also the cloud model is used in almost all of the world’s most popular services and in the nearest future the cloud solutions will become the only solutions in the world.
Endless opportunities for third-party software integration
As a business owner, you definitely know that for providing perfect customer service you have to use numerous tools such as customer relationship management systems (CRM software), helpdesk software, payment systems, time tracking systems, etc.
Switching between different tabs and tools wastes time and negatively influences the performance of your call center. But what if all these tools are integrated in a single interface? The cloud call center gives you such an option.
Conclusion
Voiptime Cloud Call Center is the solution that matches all features and capabilities we have mentioned in this article. Moreover, its functionality is much more powerful than you can expect – so to see this tool in action check the following link.
