Cloud Contact Center vs On-Prem Contact Center
In the past, contact centers were ‘on-premise’, meaning that they were hosted on servers owned by the business, either on-site or private cloud based. The task of maintaining these fell to internal IT teams.
Businesses often struggled due to:
Limited space for servers
Limited ability to maintain them (Expertise)
Limited funds to spend on extra capacity
Budget limitations to build new features/functionality and integrate these into the existing infrastructure
Continuous upgrade cycles to keep infrastructure within manufacturers supported versioning
The ability to test features with focus group clients, to ensure they are fit for purpose prior to a migration
Scalability is an issue to ensure the platform can scale to cater for seasonal peaks
This meant that businesses couldn’t scale beyond a certain level; if demand got too high, they lacked the ability to keep up. If there was a problem with the applications, the responsibility for fixing and maintaining it fell to the individual business and its IT team. In some situations, businesses could sign infrastructure support contracts with system integrators/resellers who offered off the shelf support options, which are often expensive and offer limited SLAs.
The cloud contact center, on the other hand, requires no on-premise infrastructure, and no requirement for clients to operationally manage any component of the solution. The contact center is hosted within an external data center; highly specialized facilities managed by huge teams of engineers. These facilities:
Provide extra capacity, should demand surge
Provide maintenance, including heat management
Be operationally responsible for all of the underpinning infrastructure
Deliver huge volumes of scalability to support unstructured demand
Offer huge levels of resilience, allowing cloud service providers to extend our competitive SLAs
Deliver an innovative roadmap of new features, which are rolled out across clients as part of the evergreen service proposition.
Migrating a contact center to the cloud, then, has significant benefits.
The Reasons to Use a Cloud Contact Center
The cloud offers:
Services accessible from any location.
Secure hosting in data centers.
Instant service scalability.
The ability to trial new functionality with clients to ensure a business case is in place prior to a production rollout.
Ease of consumption via a public cloud model
Allows clients to focus in on their core business, and not act as an internal service provider
So why use a cloud contact center? The benefits are obvious. Migrating a contact center to the cloud can bring massive cost efficiencies to your business, and operational benefits. It can create Customer Experience (CX) that dazzles your customers, and keeps them coming back. It can prepare your contact center for the future; giving you access to advanced AI and analytics technologies. Ultimately, cloud deployments allows clients to focus in on enhancing the service they deliver to clients, and not focus on maintaining complex, dedicated deployments.
What a Cloud Contact Center is not
An on-premise contact center
A cloud contact center is hosted within a data center provided by a third party. An on premise contact center, on the other hand is hosted on servers owned and maintained by the business. A cloud contact centre provider cannot extend out monitoring/operational access to the platform as its a multi-tenanted solution. The solution allows clients to monitor the services that underpin their customer journeys via the realtime dashboard capability.
A hosted contact center
A hosted server involves a server dedicated solely to a single business. This can be situated in an office, or in a data center. The business is still responsible for setting up and maintaining the infrastructure and the applications.
A managed contact center
A managed solution is similar to a hosted solution, with the server in a remote location, dedicated solely to one business. The key difference is that a managed services provider supports, manages, and maintains this server.
The Benefits of Migrating a Contact Center to Cloud
Reliability
Migrating a contact center to cloud means the contact center will be hosted on a specialized data center. These facilities are less prone to outages, benefitting from huge volumes of resilience, and when outages do occur, they are far easier to fix. This ensures that you’ll always be available to your customers, whenever, and wherever they need you.
Evergreen Functionality
A cloud-based contact center solution is accessed through an internet browser or mobile applications, rather than being installed on a computer. This means updates can be rolled out automatically by the provider, with no additional action required by the customer. New features can be accessed without down-time, keeping your contact center on the cutting edge.
Scalability
A cloud contact center is hosted in a data center, alongside many other cloud services. This means that, should greater capacity be required, more servers within the data center can be allocated to the contact center (usually at extra cost), allowing the contact center to scale instantly to accommodate increased demand. At the same time, organisations could scale down on agent capacity during off peak times. So a cloud contact center enables ease of scaling up or down when needed.
Flexibility
Migrating a contact center to the cloud means accessibility from anywhere. A browser-based interface can be accessed from any internet-enabled device. This allows your agents to work from anywhere, and for your contact center to appear unified, no matter how distributed your workforce. Also allows businesses to be flexible in more ways than one. Additionally clients can typically trial new functionality which can then be leveraged to service smaller focus groups of clients prior a full production rollout, which helps clients to create a robust business case.
Regulatory Drivers
CCaaS solutions typically have out of the box capability to allow customers to ensure local regulatory drivers are met, such as PCI compliant solutions, dialer solutions, and the general ability to refine services to meet local regulatory drivers.
Cost Efficiency
An on-prem solution requires constant maintenance. As providers look to close down support for on-prem solutions, that maintenance is going to become increasingly expensive. Data-center-hosted cloud services provide a cheaper solution; no money is wasted on drawing out an end-of-life solution. This model underpins the ability for clients to budget more effectively, as the CCaaS model is typically a subscription based service.
Automation
Most CCaaS providers have integrated best of breed AI providers to deliver automation-based use cases, leveraging technology such as chatbots/voicebots. Additionally most CCaaS providers have an extensive array of APIs that can facilitate integrations into key systems to deliver self-service based use cases, to help improve CX and reduce the cost of servicing interactions.
Enhancing CX by Migrating a Contact Center to Cloud
Migrating a contact center to the cloud offers endless options for enhancing your CX. Discover the potential of cloud migration with these resources:
The Future of the Contact Center
From new regulations to new channels, from agent attrition to economic disruption; this year is set to be a challenging year for the CX industry. This whitepaper will break down some of the challenges to expect this year, drawing on insights from Content Guru’s CX experts.
By the Customer, For the Customer: How Citizen Experience is Re-defining Public Services
Democracy is built on citizen engagement. Whether implementing policy, gathering information, or boosting buy-in, citizen engagement is indispensable to the practice of government. Effective citizen engagement depends on a positive citizen experience. But what does ‘citizen experience’ mean? How can digitization work to improve it?
To Boldly Go: The Future of AI in the Contact Center
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping the contact center. AI is finding applications in a vast range of different sectors and is expected to boost global GDP by $15 trillion by 2030. AI technologies are clearly delivering value for businesses, and the contact center is driving much of this early adoption, as businesses seek to differentiate their CX.
The storm® Omnichannel Cloud Contact Center
If you’re ready to take the leap to cloud, Content Guru is ready to help. Content Guru’s omnichannel cloud contact center solution, storm®, ensures that customers contacts get quickly and accurately resolved – simply put, engagement made easy.
storm is used by over 1000 enterprise-scale public and private organizations in over 50 countries, and is trusted by leading global brands for mission-critical communications.
storm® CONTACT™
The world’s leading high-volume omnichannel cloud contact center solution.
storm® CONTACT:SOCIAL™
Create digitally fluent customer experience; bring social media channels into your omnichannel cloud contact center.
storm® FLOW™
Design seamless customer journeys with an intuitive, no-code interface.
brain® Contact Center Automation
The power of AI in the palm of your hand; make Intelligent Automation a key part of your omnichannel cloud contact center.
Facilitation a Cloud Migration – How to Mitigate the Risk of Transition
One of the main areas of focus for any cloud migration, is how to ensure a successful transition, whilst continuing to meet your existing customer focused KPIs. Ensuring that the customer journeys are not compromised, takes careful planning, and a phased migration. Content Guru embraces a concept know as Dual Mode of Operation, which allows the legacy platform to be connected into the proposed new solution via SIP trunking, which helps to mitigate the risk of transition. As agent groups and the service numbers they support are migrated to the new solution, the SIP trunking ensures that calls can continue to be escalated to agent groups that are on the legacy platform as needed seamlessly.
Below is a pictorial representation, of the principles that underpin Dual Model of Operation;