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F
usion, which has a history
of providing innovative
cloud solutions to busi-
nesses of all sizes, is tak-
ing aim at a large, growing seg-
ment with significant pent-up
demand: contact centers for
mid-sized businesses.
The high-priced, prem-
ises-based solutions that
were the norm for decades
have traditionally reserved
the most sophisticated,
feature-rich solutions for the
very largest enterprises. But
the cloud enables the delivery
of enterprise-level solutions to
the mid-market, giving agents,
VARs and other sales partners a
raft of fresh opportunity.
In fact, global cloud service rev-
enues were forecasted to reach $106
billion in 2016, increasing 21 per-
cent over projected 2015 spending
levels, according to Goldman Sachs.
“The cloud is not just changing
the contact center industry but is
instead completely transforming
it,” said Fusion CEO Matt Rosen.
“We saw the opportunity within our
advanced, high-availability service
platform to enable the integration
of cloud communications, connectiv-
ity and analytics for an end-to-end
contact center approach that sales
partners can use to give mid-sized
businesses the ability to provide cus-
tomer service that equals or in many
cases surpasses their larger rivals.”
This competitive boost can
be critical, especially in indus-
tries where large market players
dominate the landscape. Fusion’s
Contact360 platform includes the
integration of features such as out-
bound as well as inbound campaign
capabilities; softphone and mobility
options; screen pops; simultaneous
screen transfer; business analytics
and customized reporting; and CRM
integration. Taken together, these
give medium-sized companies sig-
nificant productivity and collab-
oration improvements, which
in turn allows them to bet-
ter serve customers.
That means putting
an end to the common
frustrations that cause
customers to move
away, such as long hold
times and the multiple
calls to resolution often
caused by disjointed in-
teractions and re-directs.
To address the former,
customers are offered op-
tions for callback, scheduled
or ASAP, reducing average speed
of answer and abandon rates. To
address the second common frustra-
tion, Cloud360 integrates resources
and information to eliminate swivel
chair responses, and instead allows
for data-driven, schedule-based,
statistics-based, priority-based, mul-
timedia-based, skills-based routing.
In other words, calls are directed to
the right agent at the right time for
faster issue resolution.
There’s another selling point too:
moving mission-critical communica-
tions to the cloud also reduces the
cost, footprint and significant admin-
istrative and IT staffing required to
Making
Contact
By
Tara
Seals
Fusion looks to cloud to transform the contact center market
Integrated
features and
functionality
In-bound access
and network
solutions built-in
Fully scalable
Powerful
reporting and
business
analytics
Full database
and CRM
integration
Flexible cloud
migration
options
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