What is a Virtual Contact Center?
A contact center is a customer service function that handles customer issues and questions from multiple channels, such as phone, chat, and email. A virtual contact center does this as well, but without a physical facility.
Contact centers used to have to house their agents and technical equipment in large, specialized spaces or offices. But cloud computing has changed the model, making virtual contact centers possible. The agents work from home and the hardware is hosted, meaning physical facilities are unnecessary.
Adopting the virtual contact center model can be beneficial to the right type of operation. The primary perk is not having a facility to pay for and manage - no more lease payments, no more cubicles to buy, no more parking lot to pave. Along with that are the benefits of working with a cloud partner, which eliminates IT overhead such as purchasing servers, applying software updates, and allocating staff time to maintain the systems. In a virtual contact center, this is all handled by an independent software vendor.
But virtual contact centers don't come without challenges, due primarily to having a remote workforce. Businesses need to think through issues like maintaining data security, keeping agents engaged with their virtual contact center teams, and making sure agents are doing what they're supposed to do.
Fortunately, there are tools to help with much of this. For example, agent activity can be monitored with reports and by live listening and quality monitoring. Agent engagement can be managed with dashboards and collaboration tools. Organizations that want the virtual contact center model to work will figure out how to work through the challenges, plus there are many best practices to borrow from.
How NICE can help
Our solutions make virtual contact centers possible.
NICE CXone is the market leading contact center software in use by thousands of customers of all sizes around the world. CXone is a cloud native, unified suite of applications designed to help a company holistically run its contact (or call) center operations. CXone includes:
Omnichannel Routing – routing and interaction management. These solutions include an automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), interaction channel support and proactive outbound dialer.
Workforce Optimization – unlocks the potential of your team. These solutions include workforce management (WFM), quality management (QM), recording and performance management (PM).
Analytics – turns insights into results by making data relevant, easy to consume and actionable. These solutions include interaction analytics, customer surveys, reporting and performance management.
Open Cloud Foundation – enables rapid innovation with an extensible enterprise-grade platform that scales securely, deploys quickly and serves customers of all sizes globally. We guarantee an industry-best 99.99% availability and offer easy customization through RESTful APIs and DEVone developer program.
CXone also includes pre-defined CRM integrations and UCaaS integrations with most leading solutions on the market. These integrations provide a holistic contact center software solution capable of elevating customer experiences for companies of all sizes.