[caption id="attachment_6918" align="alignnone" width="1000"]Contact Center Image Credit: tmcnet.com[/caption]

COVID-19 has disrupted various businesses including contact center operations. How the cloud will help navigate this crisis?

In the time of crisis induced by the COVID-19 outbreak, the worldwide socio-economic scenario has been completely disrupted by the pandemic. This has impacted almost every business across both public and private sectors and wreaked havoc global supply chains and trade channels. Contact centers are not an exception. In this uncertain time, contact centers, even those that have effective disaster recovery plans in place, were left scrambling to bring strategy in the fight against COVID-19.

As the pandemic is continuously growing without any vaccine available, social distancing is the only cure available to prevent the spread of the virus. However, contact centers are high-contact environments, where agents and analysts work in very close, sharing equipment and available desk space with co-workers. In these tight spaces, the virus can spread very easily when it comes to maintaining distance to avoid getting infected. The Contact Center is the primary virtual customer service environment. But the traditional staffing services are no longer impactful now as the public demand for additional services and support is increasing day by day.

Thus, in the face of unprecedented circumstances, as contact centers stumble under inefficient business continuity plans, organizations need to get away from legacy infrastructure in order to construct a more agile approach to customer service and engagement. And the onset of COVID-19 has left them with the choice of either shutter down operations or find out alternative business approach and work circumstances for agents and supervisors. In this way, the obvious solution is to enable customer service agents to work from home and equip them with the technologies necessary for delivering better customer service through cloud-based solutions.

But the challenges in delivering better customer service remain constant as the on-premises solutions that most contact centers have are not able to deliver the functionality required. In order to keep contact center operations going enterprises need to ensure seamless integration of modern technologies with traditional contact center solutions. 

The incorporation of machine learning and natural language understanding (NLU) into contact centers with AI-powered solutions can be really an effective approach. Meanwhile, leveraging effective cloud-based services can also play a transformative role, especially for companies that are facing a distinct degree of anxiety among customers.

There are numerous market players offering scalable cloud-based solutions to contact centers to scale their operations, including Avaya, Cisco, and Genesys, among others. For instance, Cisco has announced Work from Home Webex Contact Center Quick Deployment solution to deliver a temporary solution (90-day subscription) with no minimum volume requirement and can be deployed in five days. For the longer-term, companies looking to replace legacy solutions need to implement various range of cloud-based solutions available in the market.