There’s only one thing we’re more excited about than the burgeoning Chicago Cubs dynasty, and that’s the rapidly-growing cloud contact center market. How fast is this industry growing? According to MarketsandMarkets, the global cloud contact center market will continue expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 23.6 percent from 2016 to 2021, when it will reach $15.67 billion.

Cloud Contact Center is in demand and the average revenue per deal is HUGE compared other solutions.  If you play your cards right, you can use this momentum to your advantage.

As an AVANT partner, you already have the business relationships in place to start selling cloud contact center services. You know how your customers’ networks are constructed, and how they feel about cloud services. But before you approach your customers with cloud contact center solutions, you’ll need to think about the right pain points to zero in on.

Why are businesses investing in cloud contact center services?
Cost is a huge reason. Legacy contact center equipment is very expensive to purchase and maintain. Like any other type of backend infrastructure, contact center equipment requires constant vigilance, as well as regular maintenance and repairs. Many contact centers continuously operate in the red zone because of their hardware.

Cloud contact center vendors like inContact, Serenova (formally Live Ops), Genesys/Interactive Intelligence and Five9 provide access to premium, hosted and secure infrastructure. This infrastructure comes with built-in managed services, and cutting-edge software as well. So the advantage for a business is it can obtain an end-to-end contact center solution for a small monthly fee, while avoiding hefty CAPEX and OPEX.

These types of vendors offer:

Rapid scalability: This is critical for growing startups, or companies that experience regular fluctuations in customer volumes.

Flexibility: Cloud contact center platforms are easy to deploy and maintain, making them ideal for remote agents or large enterprises. Contact centers can avoid complicated and expensive manual rollouts by using the cloud.

Reliability: Mention the word “downtime,” and your customer is bound to recoil in fear. Every business wants 99.999 percent uptime, especially in their busy contact centers. This is very difficult to achieve, though, with legacy infrastructure. The best cloud contact center vendors offer resilient architecture, disaster recovery and guaranteed uptime.

Productivity: Most cloud contact center vendors offer more than just bare metal infrastructure. For example, many companies offer tools that agents can use to enhance productivity and improve the customer journey.

What do cloud contact centers offer?

Specific features will vary from vendor to vendor, but here are some of the top services that will be in demand in 2017:

  • Cloud dialers: MarketsandMarkets predicts outbound dialers to have the highest CAGR in the cloud contact center market between 2016 to 2021. Outbound dialers allow agents to reach larger volumes of qualified customers. They eliminate the need to wait for a customer to pick up the phone, ensuring that agents only connect with live customers.
  • Omnichannel: This strategy involves “moving” with customers across different channels. With a an omnichannel solution in place, in other words, an agent can stay with a customer as he or she migrates from social media to live chat to SMS. It’s a way of providing seamless customer support.
  • Bots: A bot is a program that uses artificial intelligence to have automated conversations with customers over SMS or live chat. Bots are very handy for providing interactive customer service after hours.
  • Virtual desktops: Contact centers often struggle to control customer data, especially with remote agents who work at home on their own machines. Cloud contact center providers offer virtual desktops and secure platforms that agents can log into. These platforms come with built-in security measures to safeguard against data leaks.

So as you can see, cloud contact centers offer tremendous value for businesses. If you can convey these point, the services should sell themselves. Cloud contact center vendors make customer service easier, more affordable and more reliable.