5 benefits of progressing to CX in the cloud

Cloud-based customer experience platforms allow businesses to respond to customer and employee needs in real-time, improving customer satisfaction, employee engagement and operational efficiency.

Genesys latest research finds that 80% of customer experience (#CX) leaders who are still using on-premises CX solutions plan to switch to the #cloud within the next two years. The benefits they’re looking for, according to the survey, are better access to data across channels and the ability to add new channels and capabilities faster.

But there are many more benefits to the cloud, says Genesys customer and cloud evangelist, Chris Sekelsky, Principal Genesys Cloud Engineer at health insurance company Humana. Here are Chris’s top five advantages to the cloud:

1. Innovation is accelerated: Cloud-based CX technologies have frequent update cycles, some as often as weekly. New features are released so often and so quickly that organizations can innovate and iterate faster to optimize processes and improve customer experience. Automation is another area where the speed of innovation improves. For example, by auto-sending agent evaluations that need to be scored to the QA team, evaluations happen faster — and agents can then receive and address feedback faster.
2. Data is democratized: Data access can be limited with on-premises systems built more for administrator and manager oversight. The cloud opens #data availability to a wider set of users. For instance, before using cloud-based workforce engagement management, agents can't usually see all their evaluation details or scorecards. With the cloud, they have full access to see their evaluations and how they were graded. Also, they can easily listen to a recording of a customer call or review a chat transcript to see where they did great and where they didn't do so well. “These are features that the agents and supervisors just love,” said Sekelsky.
3. You can’t match the cloud for security and reliability: With an on-premises platform, employees using systems outside the contact center could inadvertently impact its performance. Somebody could, for instance, make a SQL change unrelated to customer service that could take down the entire call center. “You don't have that issue in cloud,” he said.
4. It’s a game-changer for productivity: Systems architects and engineers, as well as frontline agents, all see productivity gains from using cloud-based CX technologies. “I can build bots with ease, which is something I wouldn’t have thought possible a few years ago,” said Sekelsky. One bot build that that Sekelsky was a part of was for web messaging. That #bot has improved agent productivity; instead of taking one phone call at a time, agents now can handle three web chats at a time.
5. You always know exactly what’s going on: Cloud-based tools enable CX teams to uncover customer insights more easily for improving areas like process flows and knowledge bases. For example, Humana reviews customer intent data gathered by its chatbot on a weekly basis to see if there are any questions that could be served with a new FAQ article. This increases the number of questions the bot can answer and reduces the number of basic questions going through to agents. “That’s been one of the biggest wins we’ve had,” added Sekelsky.? ?

Another win has been analytics — especially the sentiment analysis of call recordings. “The insights it provides are absolutely amazing,” said Sekelsky. “It’s transformational to a business that didn't have information like that before.”

Learn more about the benefits of moving to the cloud in “The state of customer experience” report.