Business slows down in summer due to vacation time. That’s a fact. Be that as it may, for contact centers, considering the relatively low call center activity, the summer looks like the perfect time to see if they’re making the grade.

When business starts ramping up again, the quality of your customer service needs to be at its peak so as to bolster revenue, enhance customer satisfaction, and reduce costs. If your contact center isn’t ready for that kind of influx of traffic as business picks back up, you may be in for a surprise. For instance, according to a recent survey by Accenture, 51 percent of consumers in the U.S. will abandon a business if they are not fully satisfied with their customer service.

So what exactly can you do so that your company doesn’t become part of the statistics? Well, you may want to start by asking yourself the following questions:

• Do you have the proper contact center technology for today and for the future?
• Are you collecting data to make better informed decisions?
• Is your HR recruitment policy effective enough for your contact center?

If your answer is yes to all these questions, you’re on the right track. But if you can’t answer them affirmatively, you might want to consider deploying a cloud-based contact center solution. Here’s why:

• Your employees will be more productive. With a cloud-based contact center solution, they will be more efficient and you will gain a stronger workforce. For example, VoipNow is an all-in-one cloud communication platform designed to cover complex communication needs and intensive workflows. The system brings together voice, conferences, video calls and much more, all in one platform. In addition, VoipNow ensures an improved customer experience thanks to its history-based queue routing, which helps connect callers to the agent they spoke with in the past, making the communication thread a lot more efficient. Moreover, with IVRs and intelligent routing, all incoming calls can be directed to the right place, allowing representatives to help customers right away.
• You get access to qualitative and quantitative data. For contact centers, the greatest pressure arises from solving customer issues as soon as possible. As a result, once you have deployed your contact center tools, you can start collecting data and analyze it. That way, you will be able to make data-driven decisions regarding your contact center. With the help of a cloud-based solution, your call center managers can track and improve a long list of call-center metrics and, based on such information, they can increase revenue, improve customer satisfaction, and reduce costs. For instance, 4PSA’s solution can help optimize human resources and business processes by allowing companies to measure performance indicators such as call distribution reports, agent reports, call reports, answered/unanswered call reports, and status reports.
• Cloud-based contact centers improve their time and staff management. This is especially important since call center agents have a high turnover rate: with a cloud-based contact center, you can hire far more people who would otherwise prefer to work from home or have a flexible schedule. Whenever they’re available, they log in to the system and start taking calls. Plus, you can save money! With access to analytics, you can establish a per-call rate for these remote employees. Either way, it’s a win-win situation.

This list of features is by no means exhaustive, but it’s a good starting point. If you’re interested in optimizing your contact center so as to be able to handle a higher volume of calls more successfully, you should give VoipNow a try for free. For more insights on the subject, you may want to check out this article regarding the contribution of cloud services to an improved customer experience.