How a virtual contact center solution can change the way you run your business

A virtual contact center has many things in common with any other contact center, with one significant difference: The contact center agents do not need to be located in one central office. Since the agents use a virtual contact center solution to connect, they can work from wherever they are. In this blog post, you will learn how you can use a virtual contact center solution to transform your business for the better.

Who benefits from a Virtual Contact Center?

• Outbound, where your sales team uses the contact center solution to schedule appointments, conduct surveys or sell products and services
• Telesales, where you have a dedicated team of call center agents supports your sales by more aggressively advertising and selling your products and services
• Inbound, where you use the contact center solution to handle your customer service.
• Blended/in- and outbound, the all-in-one solution where you let the same people handle both your customer service and your sales supporting functions. 

Just because you’re giving up on a physical space doesn’t mean that you have to give up on quality. A good virtual contact center software will bring you all the same functionalities as traditional software, just with lower costs. It doesn’t matter if you’re focusing on inbound customer service, or if you’re using a predictive dialer to increase your sales, a virtual contact center software can help you.

The main benefits of a virtual contact center solution

24/7 availability and remote work possibility

If you’re doing business internationally, being available 24/7 is something your clients expect from you. Not only is constant availability being required from B2C customers, but also B2B customers expect to reach support hotlines and customer services when they want and need to.

With a virtual contact center solution, you can easily make that happen. Since a cloud-based contact center software lets your work from anywhere in the world, you can have a dedicated customer- or sales support team in a variety of time zones. 

With a cloud-based contact center software, you can also allow your agents to work from home, giving you the possibility to attain a larger pool of agents, just as Manpower did when changing their legacy system to LeadDesk.

A good solution will also enable all your teams to connect to your other systems, so they can easily access all the data that is needed to handle the relevant customer cases.

Omnichannel customer support

Today customer support means more than just having one phone line open. The keyword is to be available in the specific channel that your customer wants to use. Therefore omnichannel solutions are quickly becoming the norm for virtual call center solution providers.

With a good virtual contact center solution, voice, email, chat, SMS and social media integrations make it easy to assist your customers in any channel seamlessly. It also gives your agents some peace of mind because they don’t need to log into different portals and hop from channel to channel.

Cost-effective

A virtual contact center solution also makes sense from a financial perspective, since they are;

• Cost-effective, since no initial investments are needed. You will save money by eliminating both physical workstations and equipment.
• Easy to start using, since no installment and very little training is needed.
• Scalable, so you can manage busy seasonal times efficiently.
• Secure, since you can easily grant or deny access accordingly.
• Reports are neatly arranged and automatically calculated.

With a cloud-based contact center, there’s no need to add a new department or more employees to get started. All you need is a good solution, internet connection, and someone to pick up the virtual phone.

Lastly, a quick checklist.

When you are choosing a virtual contact center software, make sure that you at least get:

1. Multichannel functionalities – Voice, email, webchat, SMS, social media, etc.
2. Easy to use reporting – Automatic tracking and control functionalities, real-time reports any time.
3. Flexible integrations – Seamless connections between your existing sales and contact tools.
4. Security – Data is on secure servers in the cloud and no data will be saved on an agent’s computer.
5. Flexibility – not all agents are tied to one specific location