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.