Legacy contact center vendors are making their aim to move on-premise customers to the cloud more explicit. The result? More enterprises are considering a CCaaS migration.
Three years ago, Steven Walmsley, a former IT Architect at one of the world’s largest hotel groups, embraced such a transformation.
Like others in similar positions, his role revolved around maintaining a myriad of 60+ physical and virtual servers across various data centers and co-locations. That’s a lot of upkeep.
Yet, in maintaining this environment and preserving the contact center architecture, Walmsley and his team had to accept many mounting challenges.
Indeed, his IT team described the on-premise system as:
- Cumbersome and Expensive – On-premise multi-site infrastructure required manual, semi-annual upgrades to sustain its performance.
- Static and Inflexible – The team had to create and update numerous call flows per country – in many languages – without any predictive, dynamic capabilities.
- Innovation Averse – The old system proved challenging to scale and grow, while the team struggled to modify numerous applications, including the IVR…
The problems are likely familiar for many dealing with large-scale legacy contact centers. Yet, Walmsley remembers the final straw: a rebrand that required his team to rerecord 200 IVR announcements across all 14 languages.
“It was a whole process: reaching out to voice talent, booking their time, recording the messages locally in various countries, and so on.”
The process prompted Walmsley to think – not for the first time – that there had to be a better way, especially with the advancements in natural voice technologies.
Instead of maintaining complex IVR systems across various regions, what if the business could create a general purpose, dynamic flow that replicates itself across all languages? Just think of the gains in reducing its routing logic.
The answer? A migration to a CCaaS platform that integrates with best-of-breed applications – including voice and NLP technologies – which helps the business overcome all the above challenges.
Enthused, Walmsley and his team embarked on a large-scale CCaaS migration, moving 500 agents, supporting 14 languages across 800+ domestic and toll-free numbers, to the cloud.
Here are three of the most significant lessons he learned along the way.
1. Embrace a Cloud-Native Solution
Some CCaaS platforms are more scalable than others. Opting for a cloud-native CCaaS solution that scales easily is of utmost importance for extensive migration projects.
Moreover, with a cloud-native platform, organizations will find it much easier to drop in new services – such as additional communication channels – into various business processes.
Unfortunately, many CCaaS vendors – particularly those that rushed to the cloud – are not cloud-native. Instead, they offer big monolithic solutions and struggle to innovate at high velocity.
Recognizing this, Walmsley chose Amazon Connect. He stated:
“Through my initial testing, I was shocked by how quickly I could move these workloads to the cloud, with none of that service maintenance that was such a drain on time.”
Walmsley also highlighted its open platform, self-service configuration, and pricing as critical factors in choosing Amazon Connect.
Finally, he also deduced that AWS was best placed to support him in meeting the following three migration objectives, which the business viewed as mission critical:
- Give agents more context to help customers quickly
- Increase agility to make changes faster
- Keep telephone costs down to fund future CX improvement initiatives
2. Avoid Replicating Processes In the Cloud
“Be cautious of taking the systems and processes you already have today and looking for that in the cloud,” says Walmsley.
Why? Because over the years, the business likely bolted on new features to legacy systems, adding layers of complexity and circumventing older capabilities that are no longer necessary.