CCaaS vendors are luring contact centres to the cloud with the promise of greater flexibility, scalability, and business agility.
Each benefit is appealing, but the potential of faster innovation – in a world where 53 percent of B2C businesses believe CX is their biggest differentiator – is often the most effective bait.
After all, if organisations can harness AI innovations, cloud capabilities, and new integration opportunities, they can accelerate the development of their CX proposition at a rate of knots.
More contact centres are coming to terms with these benefits, as evident in recent research estimating that the CCaaS market’s value will double by 2027.
Nevertheless, all the plus points fail to conceal just how tricky a CCaaS implementation can be. Indeed, many enterprises consider it a risky, costly, and disruptive process.
As such, there are many considerations to weigh up before engaging with a contact centre vendor. The first is often choosing between a public and private cloud.
Private Cloud vs Public Cloud: What Is the Public Cloud?
NICE and Genesys are amongst the leadingstalwarts of the CCaaS space. Yet, each only offers a public cloud solution.
Indeed, their solutions live within a third-party cloud hosted by a market leader like AWS, Microsoft, or Google.
In utilising the platforms of these cloud architecture giants, vendors can deliver CCaaS over the public internet, removing the need for any onsite maintenance.
As such, the public cloud is often ideal for businesses that want to reduce their technology footprint while unlocking the benefits of scalability, responsivity, and resiliency. It’s an ideal choice for smaller contact centres, start-ups or digital-first operations and are typically pre-packaged solutions with transactional costs.
Choosing a CCaaS system built within the public cloud can deliver several other benefits for end-users. Perhaps the most appealing is that it is much quicker and easier to set up.
Thanks to this, the upfront costs are often lower than with private or hybrid alternatives.
Public cloud environments also provide convenient portals for provisioning and management, so organisations can quickly add more users, locations, and features.
Moreover, public cloud solutions come with regular updates and system releases to keep the technology up-to-date.
Final benefits typically also include:
- Standardised functionality to suit most businesses
- Exceptional 99.99% uptime from most providers
- Easy integrations with other cloud solutions
- Exceptional scalability with resources available on demand
- Flexible pricing models
- Reduced need for technical expertise
What Is the Private Cloud? The Benefits of Private Cloud CCaaS
Offering a private cloud is often a point of differentiation for the few contact centre vendors that do so, which include the likes of Avaya amongst others.
The cloud offering is often ideal for companies with complex infrastructures and significant security requirements – as it moves the contact centre into a cloud environment hosted by the vendor. These companies have voice-critical services, are operationally mature with high levels of regulation thus meaning higher levels of complexity.
When companies leverage a private cloud environment for their contact centre, they can access most of the features and benefits offered by the public cloud, with additional advantages.
For example, when a business stores data in a US-based public cloud – which includes AWS, Google, and Microsoft – the US government withholds the right to seize that data at any point. In a private environment, this is not possible. So, private is often the preferred option for enterprises that deal with customers outside the US.
In addition to protecting this sensitive data, a private environment is likely less susceptible to data breaches and security incidents.
Private clouds are also an attractive model for companies looking for more advanced, bespoke cloud services – as the vendor often tailors the environment for each customer.
In such an environment, companies retain control over updates and maintenance. Meanwhile, they do not share resources, which means consistency is often better, and businesses may negate compliance issues.
Final benefits typically also include:
- Comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity plans
- Value-added services offered by vendors
- 999% uptime availability options
- Auditing for regulated organisations to improve compliance
- Easy access to innovative technology
Choosing Between Private and Public Cloud Options
Both private and public cloud environments offer exceptional opportunities for companies investing in agility, scalability, and business continuity.
Nevertheless, as evident in the descriptions above, both have pros and cons.
A private cloud may be more expensive and labour-intensive to access than a public solution, but it can also offer more customisation options, resiliency and greater security.
Public clouds don’t give companies the same level of control over their services, but they’re often easier to implement, more accessible, and easier to integrate with other cloud services.
In addition, public clouds are typically easier to manage for businesses with little access to technical professionals, as most of the maintenance work is covered by the vendor.
Since both public and private cloud solutions have their positives and negatives, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for choosing the ideal solution.
Indeed, some companies even choose to combine aspects of the public and private cloud environment with hybrid ecosystems to gain the benefits of both worlds.
Optimising Your Cloud Transition
Whether choosing a public or private cloud environment, business leaders must take lots into account when considering the optimal CCaaS provider to partner with.
Choosing between these two cloud environments will narrow down the field. Yet, contact centres must also consider the core enterprise technologies they want to integrate with, such as CRM, ERP, and UC solutions. Does the vendor offer APIs to harness these solutions?
Then, think about: does the vendor offer all the desired customer engagement channels? How easy is its user interface to navigate? What does its roadmap for future innovation look like?
These considerations only scratch the surface of what a contact centre must consider.
Teaming up with a partner to support this decision and the subsequent CCaaS implementation is likely the safest course of action.
Recognising this, many businesses team up with Sabio.
Why Sabio? Find out for yourself by visiting: sabiogroup.com
