To keep up with rapidly changing customer expectations, today’s businesses need to evolve and upgrade their customer experience (CX) strategy as quickly as possible.
For many organizations, a single course of action remains available that can bring about a step change in performance and expand the CX horizon whilst delivering unheralded levels of efficiency.
Traditional contact centers relied on disjointed, legacy on-premise phone-based solutions, which struggled to deliver the agility, scalability or feature-rich interactive experience that modern companies expect and increasingly require. Making changes to on-premise contact centers, whether to accommodate digital channels of communication, facilitate new Intelligent Automation capabilities, or simply integrate with systems of record, necessitates significant investment in time, money, and skill. This is why most organizations who have not already done so are migrating their customer contact to the cloud. In fact, by 2031, the global Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) industry is expected to generate an annual value of $19.8 billion.
The first step of any contact center’s digital journey is cloud migration. A cloud contact center gives companies license to empower their agents to deliver exceptional customer experiences from anywhere, as well as providing the platform for today’s omnichannel and tomorrow’s AI-driven CX. Here’s everything you need to know about transitioning your contact center to the cloud.
What is a Cloud Contact Center?
A cloud contact center, otherwise known as a Contact Center-as-a-Service or ‘CCaaS’ solution, is a software deployment model for contact center technology that allows any organization to access infinite scalability and agility. CCaaS is provided to an organization from a specialized cloud platform, which is shared by hundreds or thousands of other organizations and yet is configured for the individual requirements of each one. CCaaS solutions empower companies to custom-build their perfect customer experience solution and pay for the services they need on a subscription basis, reducing operational costs and opening up new possibilities for improvement and innovation.
Cloud contact centers come in a variety of shapes and sizes. For instance the Gartner CCaaS Magic Quadrant – the usual benchmark for the cloud contact center industry – lists the nine leading global vendors of CCaaS technologies. These vendors vary in how they approach the CX challenge, but they all reduce a company’s reliance on hardware and maintenance, minimize the need for complex setup and configuration, and provide access to a range of resources and integrations that will improve CX.
The Benefits of Migrating Your Contact Center to the Cloud
With cloud contact centers, any organization has the capability to deliver a scalable, reliable, and consistent service to customers all over the world. With the right CCaaS solution, companies can leverage CCaaS to benefit from:
Flexibility
Perhaps the biggest benefit of a cloud contact center is flexibility. With easy-to-use tools (often low-code or no-code) accessible by the organization’s staff in the cloud, businesses can rapidly update and change their CX strategy, adopting new channels of engagement, integrations to systems of record, and self-service or Intelligent Automation options, enabling organizations to deliver dynamic CX at speed and get ahead of changing customer expectations.
The best CCaaS solutions take this flexibility to even greater lengths, including providing accessible integration into multiple Artificial Intelligence (AI) engines. This means that even organizations who lack their own data science function can leverage the latest generative AI, Natural Language Processing and image processing technologies to provide their customers with facilities such as instant language translation, conversational self-service and automated call summaries.
Similarly, some leading-edge CCaaS platforms now incorporate in-built Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), which sit atop and orchestrate the data from an organization’s multiple underlying systems of record, including Customer Relationship Management. CDP-enabled CCaaS provides a 360-degree view of each customer at a glance, showing all of their interactions with an organization and other behavioral data to enable delivery of a personalized service, without impacting the organization’s existing IT estate.
Scalability
While on-premise contact centers are limited by an organization’s physical space and network connectivity, cloud contact centers can scale up and down based on customer demand, number of employees, and geographical presence. Service agents and supervisors can work from any device, in any location, with new user accounts added to the platform in minutes. In addition, cloud contact centers empower and support agents to maintain high levels of productivity and data security wherever they are, making CCaaS essential for the age of hybrid and remote work.
Reliability
78% of customers surveyed reported that one bad experience with a contact center permanently changed their perception of a brand. The worst experience is the total or partial unavailability of a contact center through a technical outage. A cloud contact center delivers exceptional reliability, minimizing the risk of downtime, and preventing many potential disasters. Cloud contact centers, as opposed to on-premise solutions, utilize specialized ultra-resilient infrastructure specifically created to guarantee availability. Some vendors offer 99.999% uptime warranties, as well as high-grade security features and access controls. Because if data is the new oil, then data loss is the new oil spill, with the potential to inflict terminal damage on even a long-established and otherwise stable business.
Martin Taylor, Co-Founder and Deputy CEO of Content Guru, commented:
“Good CX should be effortless and meet customers where they are. Relying on outdated, on-premise legacy solutions means it’s difficult, or even impossible, to stay up-to-date with the latest contact channels and ever-changing customer expectations. Complicated IT estates and a lack of flexibility mean that customers will be forced to interact with your business on your terms, not theirs. Today’s customer is less loyal than ever, and they will soon switch to an alternate provider of even the most essential service, if a better CX is available.
“The cloud offers businesses unmatched operational efficiency, scalability and flexibility, facilitating seamless interactions through multiple connected communication channels. When combined with AI, intelligent automation and custom integrations into systems of record, first-class CX becomes straightforward with CCaaS, helping improve Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as reduced customer effort scores (CES) and more effective first contact resolution (FCR).”
Choosing a Cloud Contact Center Vendor
Selecting the right cloud contact center requires companies to consider a variety of different factors. You’ll need to ensure you’re working with a vendor who can make your migration as smooth as possible, offer exceptional reliability, and provide access to the right features. Beyond that, a good CCaaS vendor should become your partner in a journey of iteration and innovation.
The following steps will help you to choose the best solution for your migration:
Step 1: Examine the User Experience
Excellent user experience is essential when migrating to a cloud-based contact center.
The more intuitive the tools provided by your vendor, the easier it will be to encourage adoption among your staff. This will also translate into lower headcount churn and a reduced training overhead. The best vendors will be able to offer access to powerful tools that can be customized to suit the needs of your teams.
Step 2: Consider Essential Features
Moving your contact center into the cloud is an excellent opportunity to upgrade your CX strategy. Many cloud contact centers offer similar features, such as customizable interactive voice response (IVR) systems, automatic call distribution, and omnichannel capabilities for communicating with customers via the methods they prefer in different situations.
However, some vendors can offer more advanced solutions, such as AI and intelligent automation, to streamline your workforce and empower agents, as well as compliant call recording, monitoring and auditing tools to boost compliance.
Other key features to consider include are:
- Integrations and APIs for expanding your contact center functionality
- Intelligent automation, including AI-powered IVRs and chatbots
- Workforce management (WFM) tools to boost productivity and agent experience
- Compliance tools to ensure that you are conforming to industry regulations
- Analytics and reporting tools to help track data-driven business insights
- Customer data platforms (CDPs) for converging and unifying customer data
- Knowledge management tools to empower and support agents
Step 3: Find a Vendor that Brings it All Together
Moving an entire contact center into the cloud can be a complex and even daunting process. The right vendor will make that process as simple as possible. A leading vendor should be able to provide guidance and support through each stage of your migration journey.
They should make it easy to unify all of your contact center resources, with customizable integrations and the ability to scale your customer experience efforts over time.
Martin Taylor commented:
“Your organization needs a solution that will consistently provide value for years to come. From data-driven CX insights and integrations that strengthen and evolve, rather than rip and replace, your current IT systems. With the right cloud contact center provider you can get a bespoke yet continuously-evolving solution tailored to your organization’s changing needs. Keep up with your customers by providing seamless, efficient CX through the engagement channels of their choice, and can update flexibly to adapt to your growing business.”
Migrating Your Contact Center to the Cloud
The cloud is the platform of choice for companies investing in customer experience. Offering exceptional scalability and flexibility, the cloud provides businesses with the most convenient and economical way to enhance and develop their CX strategies, and delight an increasingly demanding and fickle customer base.
With the right migration strategy, and the right CCaaS technology provider, you can future-proof your business, empower your teams, and consistently improve your customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores whilst enabling unforeseen levels of efficiency.
