3 Tips to Scale Your Contact Center with Confidence

On-premise contact centers are built to scale to a certain point. They’re only sized to support a certain amount of users, inbound calls and functionality. Past this peak, customer experiences begin to go downhill. To scale quickly, on-premise contact centers need to increase the number of licenses, their compute infrastructure, PSTN connectivity, and their hosting capacity. However, it can take many months to put these systems and support mechanisms in place. This makes it near impossible to scale at a moment’s notice. Contact centers are fast-paced environments, and organizations cannot afford to delay operations while scaling.

To avoid a last minute scramble when pressure ramps up, on-premise solution users should migrate to a cloud contact center model. A CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) solution, provides you with a clear advantage in a crisis – the COVID-19 pandemic serves as a prime example of this. With cloud technology, you can scale up and continue to deliver vital customer support from any location. The more experienced CCaaS providers can enable your contact center to be up and running within 48 hours, so you can keep delivering great customer experiences as you transition to a more effective solution.

Scaling for expected, as well as unexpected demand, requires rapid changes to your services, management and workforce. Perhaps your physical contact center needs to be partially, or completely vacated, in which case you need to manage and support a disparate workforce. Either way, worrying about the technicalities of scaling your contact center is something you don’t have time for.

CCaaS providers take care of the technical, time consuming side of scaling, but not just any one will do. Go for a credible CCaaS provider, one with a proven track-record of delivering unrivalled scalability that supports countless high-profile organizations. Such a provider will ensure that services scale perfectly as and when you need them, whether planned or unplanned.

The best vendors won’t charge any extra for queuing calls in the cloud, so there’s no impact on your business. Likewise, look for a ‘five nines’ solution availability SLA (99.999%). This equates to a downtime of no more than roughly 5 minutes and 30 seconds per year, ensuring a consistently active service, even at peak times. With a dependable provider, you will receive ongoing support to determine the best ways for your particular business to service all inbound interactions.

A major limitation when scaling up quickly is the lack of front-line customer service staff. In order to physically service each interaction coming into your contact center, ideally you need more customer service agents. How can you add the extra man power at short notice, without the need to on-board new agents?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is your most valuable player in such high-demand situations. A form of Artificial Intelligence (AI), NLP analyses natural dialogue to draw contextual meaning as a means to understand language in the way humans do. Organizations using NLP within the contact center can automate speech recognition through integration with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology. This allows businesses to understand and find trends in customer intent, and to service customers on an automated basis, making common queries in an emergency easy to resolve, such as “When will the electricity come back on in my area?”.