Leverage the cloud to transform your contact centre capabilities

Karl Reed, VP of Solutions of Connect SA (Previously Pivotal Data)

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On average, businesses only replace their legacy contact centre solution every seven to 10 years, which poses significant risks to the company and its competitiveness.

Firstly, these rip-and-replace overhauls often entail painful and protracted processes, which can cause significant disruption to customer service levels, large costs to the business and business continuity without immediate discernible benefits.

Perhaps more significantly in today's dynamic industry, seven plus years is effectively a whole generation, by which stage solutions are typically obsolete and ill-equipped to meet prevailing demands and preferences related to customer experience and omnichannel engagement.

Moreover, technology capabilities today evolve at pace as the dynamic vendor landscape constantly develops and introduces new innovations on a weekly basis.

Cloud computing is the major driving force behind the pace and scale of the technology revolution unfolding within the contact centre environment, which has effectively rendered the seven-year life cycle downright detrimental to your business.

Following an acceleration in cloud transformation within the sector due to the pandemic and the maturing of the cloud contact centre model, organisations that have not yet moved the technology that enables their contact centre into the cloud are rapidly recognising the strategic importance.

Moreover, companies that took a more cautious approach by piloting a cloud solution alongside their on-premises platform are now ready to make the leap.

Whether your contact centre operation is heading towards the end of its technology life cycle, or you plan to move from the test and assess phase in your cloud transformation roadmap, this white paper shares insightful information and practical approaches from our contact centre solution experts to support a less painful and more effective procurement process.

The first step to a successful contact centre cloud migration starts with a thorough assessment of business needs in terms of the contact centre capabilities your business requires today and your future requirements.

This process should include selecting the right people in your organisation to contribute to the assessment process and champion the implementation internally.

This team should include representatives from every department that utilises the solution to ensure everyone's requirements align with a common goal and that everyone gets what they need.

This internal team should determine the ‘must-haves’ and prioritise additional elements in alignment with the company's overall customer relationship management (CRM) strategy and each department's specific requirements and the overall business values the organisation is driving towards.

This requirements-led approach will also help identify any capabilities from the existing platform that the company may need to retain.

After determining the business requirements, the search for the appropriate technical solution and an implementation partner can begin.

Having established the fundamental business requirements, a company should select an expert service provider that has a thorough understanding of the market and a proven track record in the industry.

A suitably qualified and experienced service provider can help define multiple potential routes to achieve the defined contact centre transformation objectives by offering expertise across multiple vendors and technologies (not just a single offering), augmented by a broad skills base for expert implementation and support.

More importantly, choosing to partner with a single contact centre service provider means they can focus their efforts on identifying where they can innovate and add value.

A knowledgeable and experienced service provider can recommend hosted solutions that will enable integration with existing cloud-based services from vendors like Amazon, Microsoft and Google, while future-proofing operations by unlocking access to more advanced capabilities down the line as contact centre needs evolve.

In this regard, it is crucial that a technology partner can grow with the business and deliver on the full vision and cloud transformation roadmap, rather than simply implement a minimum viable solution and walk away.

While businesses rightly follow a robust selection process aligned with transparent criteria, this ethos can lead to an unconstructive focus on measurable elements – notably return on investment (ROI).

This typically results in friction between the finance and IT departments as they argue whether the vendor’s ROI claims are credible. The reality is that a financial ROI is almost always a best-case projection and realising the full figure requires that numerous elements fall into place.

The value a cloud-based contact centre can deliver is far broader than simple financial ROI. These benefits include:

• The ability to perform essential or critical business tasks more effectively;
• Adding services and opportunities not currently available;
• Enhancing the customer experience (CX), increasing retention, satisfaction and lifetime value, potentially beyond the lifetime of the solution you’re buying;
• Improving the employee experience (EX) and enhancing agent productivity;
• Reducing risks associated with a loss of vendor updates and support for outdated or solutions that have passed their product life cycle;
• Enabling remote working capabilities in an era increasingly characterised by a blended workplace model; and
• Delivering added resilience through enhanced business continuity capabilities and redundancies with failover options should the primary platform or connectivity fail.

There is no doubt that these elements are harder to measure and evaluate than ROI. But when ROI itself is not guaranteed, it is imperative to reconsider its importance in the selection criteria.

When migrating to the cloud, many organisations prefer a safety-first phased approach built around a large-scale implementation to create a minimum viable product. Typically, that means replicating the majority of their current feature-set in the cloud.

When a company starts their cloud migration journey, locking down the existing contact centre platform is often a missed opportunity to test, learn and innovate. This process may reveal invaluable lessons or enhancements that will deliver immediate value and provide vital insights for the future contact centre.

For example, adding automation capabilities to an on-premises solution can enhance CX by supporting self-service and helping manage incoming call volumes while the broader cloud migration takes place in the background.

This also creates opportunities to test and learn new processes and procedures, which will provide a further benefit once the move to a cloud environment is complete, with greater scope for deeper automation.

Once the cloud solution is fully implemented, businesses can unlock new capabilities to drive the innovation agenda.

However, despite this new-found ability to add capabilities at speed, many organisations stifle innovation due to hesitancy around the decision to invest in add-on solutions and capabilities.

When considering new features, business decision-makers must establish processes for evaluating these proposals to maximise the value from cloud-based contact centre solutions and the competitive advantage they offer.

Making the most of the flexibility of a cloud solution isn’t just about having agile processes to implement new features; there also needs to be agility in decision-making.

If your company is ready to transform your current call centre solution, contact us for bespoke advice based on proven expertise and access to a vast range of solutions and vendors for the best solution to your individual requirements.

We hold the experience and expertise to define your contact centre transformation path and provide the insight for a business-enabling change, delivered at speed. We are the right partner to help you find the right contact centre solution to realise the optimum result.