As customers become more digitally fluent, they quickly learn to leverage new channels at their disposal to make engaging with business as convenient as possible in different situations. That inherently means they will use multiple channels throughout their relationships, even within the context of a single issue.
As this happens, relationships with customers take a turn towards increased complexity, with a need to monitor, track, react and respond to, record and report on these interactions across multiple channels. It can be a daunting challenge.
But, it doesn’t have to be. The same tools customers have learned to use can become part of the contact center environment, making it easy for customer service teams to meet customers when, where, and how they choose to engage. In fact, doing so is not an option – along with becoming digitally savvy, today’s customers have become much less tolerant of customer service that doesn’t meet their expectations and are likely to move to competitive businesses.
This need to transform contact centers and meet customers on their terms is precisely why so many mid-market businesses are moving to cloud contact centers. Modern cloud solutions, like Genesys PureCloud, offer an effective transition strategy from legacy to cloud contact centers to reduce costs, provide better customer experiences, provide employees the tools they need to feel empowered, optimize business efficiency, and ensure scalability and flexibility.
Too often, businesses find themselves with an operational or technology problem that has been building, but has gone ignored for some time – typically due to lack of expertise, time, or budget. Eventually, these problems have a material impact on productivity and revenue, as leadership is forced to address them. The question then becomes this: What options do businesses have for replacing their legacy technology with a cost-effective, functional solution that will help their teams work more effectively?
These are the factors driving businesses to move business applications to the cloud. This makes the jump to a cloud contact center an easy decision once they weigh the benefits against alternatives.
In fact, over the past two years, Genesys averaged more than three deals a day displacing antiquated competitor solutions. In 2018, Genesys cloud solutions accounted for more than half of those displacements, driving more than a 100% year over year growth rate for PureCloud. But, it’s more than just because PureCloud offers a cloud-based contact center; it’s because of the breadth of value PureCloud offers its mid-market and enterprise customers.
Breadth of features and functionality
With PureCloud, small and mid-sized businesses have out-of-the-box access to the same technologies and features that have traditionally been seen as being reserved for large enterprises. Starting with a complete omnichannel contact center solution, PureCloud adds workforce management tools, drag and drop self-service IVR design with speech recognition (or integration with natural language processing engines), outbound campaign management and integration into agent workflows, and custom dashboards and reporting for actionable insights.
The complete solution delivers agents all the tools they need to engage customers across all channels; ensures agents have all customer information at their fingertips to provide an exceptional customer experience; and provides all the dashboards, reporting, and real-time analytics to enable supervisors and executives to make informed decisions and better manage their teams.
Simple end-to-end deployment and management
Starting with pricing, Genesys has made PureCloud purchasing as simple as possible, offering three basic tiers available month-to-month or with annual contracts. While it’s not quite to the click and buy Amazon model yet, the acquisition process mirrors other simple cloud services.
One of the challenges the mid-market faces is a lack of large IT teams – in some cases, it may be a single IT employee tasked with managing all infrastructure, applications, devices, and users. Among the hallmarks of successful cloud solutions is relieving businesses from the burden of heavy administration — particularly useful when those organizations don’t have the expertise or bandwidth to do much. PureCloud makes management simple, giving customers enough control to make the contact center application useful for their business and customers. It’s designed with ease-of-use in mind, so contact center management can reside with contact center employees, leaving more complex tasks like network and integration management to the IT teams.
Another benefit of cloud services is that updates are simple for customers. Genesys pushes out new releases to PureCloud nearly every week, ensuring all customers are using the latest and greatest features versions every time they open the app. It also means there are incremental changes that typically don’t necessitate heavy training, as opposed to quarterly or even less frequent updates that result in major feature changes impacting agents’ ability to operate effectively.
All-in-one communications solution
Unlike other contact center platforms, PureCloud provides not only a unified contact center experience, but also can be deployed as a Unified Communications solutions across entire businesses, with full-featured voice services using either Genesys or a third-party carrier. From WebRTC and voice features like voicemail and group ring to real-time collaboration tools, such as video conferencing, chat, screen share and more, PureCloud puts the entire business on a single technology platform. It also includes Android and iOS apps to extend UC capabilities to users anywhere, any time.
This is a differentiating factor for PureCloud and a tremendous opportunity for businesses to not only consolidate their technology, but to bring contact center employees and knowledge workers onto a unified platform that allows everyone to be part of the customer service equation. Often, the ability to collaborate with a resident expert can result in a much faster and effective solution for customers. The UC capabilities of PureCloud allow that level of business-wide engagement.
Scalability, redundancy and reliability
Cloud is inherently scalable. PureCloud ensures businesses are able to run distributed teams or remote agents as needed, either on a permanent or temporary basis. All that’s required is a good Internet connection. This also provides a natural disaster recovery and business continuity plan, which is something mid-market businesses typically overlook and see as a large enterprise need.
PureCloud is built on AWS in multiple regions to ensure geographically independent fault tolerance and redundancy and scalability without performance degradation. Businesses from 50-25,000 agents – including 10,000 logged-in agents – are using PureCloud to run their operations, regardless of where agents are located or what channel(s) they handle.
Business-wide integration
PureCloud is also both an app and a platform. While many businesses start with the all-in-one contact center application, PureCloud offers incredible flexibility and scalability as needs evolve or businesses grow.
PureCloud offers a wide array of business application integrations with simple click-to-install deployment. The Genesys AppFoundry Marketplace includes more than 250 pre-built applications and integrations with major software application vendors, like Salesforce, Zendesk, Oracle, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics365, Google G Suite, Microsoft Active Directory, and others. As customers’ needs expand and they are looking for new ways to create better customer or agent experiences, if there isn’t an existing application or integration, PureCloud’s APIs and SDKs make it easy for developers to create custom applications to meet any needs.
With all the capabilities built into PureCloud and the extensibility it offers, Genesys brings a more complete cloud contact center solution than others on the market, maximizing the value. Importantly, even with the extensive functionality, Genesys has placed a premium on making PureCloud intuitive to use and manage, believing that if customers can’t use it, it’s not going be useful and they’ll find other solutions to make employees’ jobs easier, deliver better customer experiences, increase revenue opportunities, and reduce costs.
To learn more about PureCloud and how your business can better understand and measure the effectiveness of your contact center teams as your customer engagements become more complex, don’t miss this upcoming webinar on Wednesday, March 13:
A Plan to Measure Your Call Center Success in 2019.
Edited by
Erik Linask
