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.