How to Overcome Contact Center Cloud Migration Barriers in Your Organization

Why Do Contact Center Cloud Migration Barriers Exist?

Your contact center is the face of your business. When customers reach out, they expect an instant response, every time. If you can’t provide that, your reputation will suffer. 78% of customers report that a single interaction changed their opinion of a business; both for the better, and the worse.

Making a change as drastic as adopting a new contact center solution can be incredibly daunting. When any interruption of service can result in lost customers, surely it’s better to be safe than sorry?

There is a time and place for this kind of caution, but it can also hold back your business. As the cloud becomes more and more ubiquitous, it’s well past time your organization set caution aside and looked to the future.

So what are the main sources of caution that need to be overcome?

• Reluctance to embrace cloud advantages  – what does the cloud offer that an on-premise solution doesn’t already provide?

• Migration troubles – will the process of migrating to the cloud be time-consuming and difficult? What happens to existing records and systems?

• Reliability – is the cloud as reliable as an on-premise solution? Will it lead to more outages? Is it secure?

• Control – migrating to the cloud takes much of the technical control out of an organization’s hands. Is that a mistake?

To make cloud technology an integral part of your IT systems, you need to tackle each of these contact center cloud migration barriers, one by one. To do this, you need to fully understand what the cloud can offer your organization.

The Benefits of Cloud

The potential of the cloud is vast. To detail all the benefits of the cloud would take a blog all on its own. Even so, a snapshot of those benefits will be useful.

The key benefits of the cloud contact center include:

• Improved Agent Experience (AX), boosting employee satisfaction and reducing rates of agent attrition.

• Enhanced CX, driving customer loyalty with positive experiences your customers will never forget.

• Reduced business costs and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), transforming your contact center into a value center.

• Consistent availability and reliable business continuity, ensuring your customers can reach you from any location, at any time, and over any channel.

• Foolproof security, ensuring that data is kept secure, and customer trust is safeguarded.

To overcome contact center cloud migration barriers, you keep your eye on the benefits. Still, not everyone will be convinced by this benefits-first approach. Next, you need to overcome the practical concerns of migration, reliability, and control.

Planning for Cloud Migration

The process of migration can seem daunting, as numerous different stakeholders, across an organization, need to be consulted and involved. The barriers to contact center cloud migration are found here; are the benefits of cloud worth the effort?

There are several ways to tackle any contact center cloud migration barrier.

• Cloud migration isn’t as complicated as it seems. With no need for costly capital investment or new infrastructure, getting the system up and running is as simple as provisioning users and adding inbound channels.

• With a browser-based agent interface, all your users need to do is log in via any internet-enabled device.

• A cloud contact center solution integrates with any third-party solution via API. This makes slotting your new cloud solution into your existing infrastructure easy.

• Once this is done, you can bring online additional functionality, such as contact center analytics and AI-powered self-service.

Most contact center cloud migration barriers stems from a reluctance to leave behind older, pre-cloud systems. The cloud is designed for ease of integration, meaning you can have your cloud solution up and running in a matter of days.

Cloud-Based Reliability

The next major contact center cloud migration barrier surrounds reliability. 58% of customers will leave a brand they previously loved after just one bad customer service experience. Being available to customers at any time, over any channel, is more important than ever.

On-premise solutions are certainly reliable, but cloud solutions offer an overwhelming advantage:

• Some cloud contact center solutions can boast an availability of over 99.999%. This compares and even surpasses most on-premise solutions.

• Cloud contact centers are hosted in data centers, staffed by dedicated engineering teams. This means that when there is an outage (and both cloud and on-premise solutions suffer outages) the responsibility falls on the data center, rather than your organization, to bring it back up.

• Backup data centers allow your customer contact systems to keep running even if your primary center experiences an outage.

• Data centers provide extra capacity, meaning that when demand surges beyond regular levels, extra capacity can be allocated to your organization. Cloud contact centers allow for reliable service, even at times of peak demand.

Reluctance to migrate a contact center to the cloud often stems from a desire to stick with what is known to work. In the world of the contact center, however, flexibility is just as important as reliability. The cloud offers both, far in excess of on-premise alternatives.

Cloud Security and Control

One benefit of an on-premise contact center solution is full sovereignty; over your servers, your data, and the associated infrastructure. This may appear advantageous over cloud software. It lets your organization run its contact center the way it wants to, without being dependent on third-party providers.

Overcoming this contact center cloud migration barrier requires recognition that:

• The benefits of full sovereignty are often outweighed by the risks. If your organization is responsible for maintaining a service, you’re also responsible for fixing it when it goes down.

• Contact center cloud migration still allows for a degree of sovereignty. Organizations have dedicated capacity reserved for them within data centers.

• Cloud contact centers come equipped with their own security features. Secure agent-less and agent-assisted payment interfaces allow sensitive customer data to be kept on a ‘need-to-know’ basis.

Contact center cloud migrations means that your organization gets the support of your cloud provider, and their dedicated team of engineers. Migrating to the cloud reduces your responsibility, and the cost, of maintaining and operating a contact center.