3 Ways the Cloud is Transforming Retail Contact Centers — in Time for the Busiest Season

Some of retail’s busiest days are coming up fast, and contact centers everywhere are going to be stretched to their breaking point as shoppers log on and call in to ask about offers, seek recommendations, chase packages, and organize returns.

Whether it’s Black Friday, Cyber Monday or the first day of January sales, the contact centers that manage the press and adapt quickly to immediate business changes will belong to the brands that have made the jump to the cloud.

Cloud-based contact centers are more intelligent and more cost efficient. That means more satisfaction for shoppers, a bigger range of resources for agents, and potentially major savings and revenue for brands. How?

The Power of the Cloud Gives You Better Insight Into the Customer Experience

A connected contact center is a truly powerful tool for customer experience. When a customer opens a live chat window on your website, or calls into your helpline, they expect your agents to have access to information about their previous purchases as well as conversations they’ve had with your brand before.

However, that requires a lot of integrations that traditional contact centers simply lack.

In the cloud, it’s much easier to give your agents access to all the context they need to offer targeted support (and quickly). Cloud-based contact centers can link up to your CRM, billing tools, sales database, and any other cloud systems that hold useful data. Brands can then distill that data to provide artificial intelligence-driven, personalized recommendations both in terms of dialog and products

Plus, with your contact center in the cloud it’s much simpler to keep track of customer satisfaction scores, average hold times and conversion rates. In turn, that gives you a better handle on major key performance indicators — and insight into which tweaks lead to the most improvement.

It’s Easier to Add New Channels — Without Taxing Your Infrastructure

If you want to meet your customers on their preferred turf, expanding the range of channels they can use to contact you is vital. However, connecting new channels like WhatsApp, live chat or virtual assistants to an on-premise contact center solution isn’t always easy — and it puts extra pressure on an infrastructure that’s probably already creaking under the strain.

The flexibility of cloud-based contact centers makes it simple to integrate a new channel or tool without bringing the whole thing down around your agents’ ears. And because the cloud is flexible, you can easily expand capacity to handle more interactions and add more agents without needing to plug in yet another on-premises server. Plus, organizations can easily capitalize on the data and intent-based dialog already in existence.

AI Thrives in the Cloud — and Brings New Opportunities With it

Forget stagnant scripts and out-of-date routing; by introducing AI into your contact center, you can help agents interact with customers more dynamically. With AI monitoring interactions in the background, you can set up predictive analytics to deliver hyperpersonalized recommendations, next-best actions, and opportunities to cross-sell and upsell, directly onto your agent’s screen in real time.

For example, rather than take every customer who requests a return on the same journey to printing a returns label, your agents can help them find an appropriate exchange instead — or even lead them to a whole new product they’ll love.

There’s So Much More to Explore

Moving your contact center to the cloud opens up a universe of possibilities for retail contact centers, including new ways to run day-to-day support chats to handling the absolute peak of holiday sales.

Retail customer engagement leaders are engaging new and returning customers alike with AI-supported, context-driven interactions in the cloud. Make sure you’re one of them.

Seb Reeve is the director of intelligent engagement business development at Nuance Communications, an American multinational computer software technology corporation.