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The Cloud Is Calling
by Linda Chen, Chief Marketing Officer, Cyara
The brick-and-mortar contact center will soon be a thing of the past.
Even before COVID-19, call center executives had seen the writing on the wall. Digital transformation was picking up steam, and the physical constraints of legacy models were making less sense by the year. In 2020, Gartner forecasted that 50% of contact centers would shift their operations to the cloud by 2022.*
Now, just two years later, that looks like a forecast that will fall far short of reality. A global pandemic has made remote work and digital customer engagement more than mere perks — they’re now essential for doing business. For call centers, that means migrating to the cloud to offer Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) technology will soon be par for the course.
Will your business be able to keep up with these changes? Let’s take a closer look at what’s happening, how the cloud can transform your business for the better, and what you can do to prepare your call center for cloud migration.
The Cloud Is Rolling In
It’s hard to overstate the impact of digital transformation on contact centers around the globe. Originally, Gartner had already predicted a jump from 10% contact center cloud adoption in 2019 to 50% in 2022. That now seems like an easy target.
For starters, consider how broadly cloud adoption is affecting every business — and every aspect of business — beyond just call centers. According to survey data from McKinsey and Company, the average company expects to spend 80% of its IT-hosting budget on cloud technology by 2024. That’s a big leap from the 45% initially planned in 2021 — another sign that the pandemic put this process into overdrive.†
For contact centers specifically, AVANT reports that the CCaaS market will grow from its current global size of $3 billion to $10.5 billion by 2027. That growth isn’t shocking when you consider that most IT decision-makers planned to start implementing CCaaS solutions by mid-2022, if they hadn’t done so already.**
For many service-oriented businesses, the contact center has become the inflection point for digital transformation. As consumers shift toward expecting digital interactions that move seamlessly across channels from IVR to text messaging to online chat, the contact center is at the center of it. And cloud migration proves central to meeting these new CX expectations.
The Cloud Is Good for Your Business
Why is the cloud so critical for contact center transformation? To understand that, let’s look at five key benefits it offers over legacy systems.
1. Flexibility
According to Forrester, 81% of contact center executives report that the cloud has made their business more flexible.†† It’s not difficult to see why.
Legacy contact center solutions, constrained as they are by brick-and-mortar locations and physical infrastructure, automatically limit your call center’s capabilities. Without the cloud, you can’t rely on a remote workforce, for instance. It’s much harder to manage an inventory of phone numbers and keep customer journeys up to date when everything is geographically dispersed rather than centralized. The cloud brings everything together and allows you to adapt more easily to your business’s changing needs.
2. Scalability
Migrating to the cloud also makes it much easier to scale your business up or down, as needed.
Retail businesses may see huge spikes in call volume during the holiday season. Health insurance companies must be prepared for far more calls during open enrollment than throughout the rest of the year. Having your contact center in the cloud means you can expand or contract your business by adding phone numbers, changing call routing, or expanding your remote workforce to meet these fluctuating demands.
When you can do all this without adding more brick-and-mortar locations or other physical infrastructure, you can grow your business without increasing capital and operating expenditures.
3. Visibility and Control
The cloud also offers call centers real-time insights and control. Testing and monitoring are easy to integrate throughout the software development cycle and in the live production environment. When it’s all based in the cloud, you can see what’s happening anytime, anywhere.
At Cyara, we’ve seen countless clients benefit from the way the cloud allows them to pull back the veil. One leading consumer electronics brand was particularly surprised by how easy it was to verify call quality and keep tabs on customer experience.
4. Innovation
Moving your contact center to the cloud opens up an array of new doors for your business. With the cloud, you gain access to more robust automated testing, AI-driven technology, live monitoring and more that you simply can’t implement within a legacy system.
Essentially, cloud migration helps future-proof their technology infrastructure. Once you’re in the cloud, it becomes that much easier to innovate and adapt.
5. Enhanced CX
Finally, a cloud-based contact center allows you to meet your top priority: delivering a better CX. This is where all the other benefits of CCaaS ultimately lead. When your contact center can adapt more quickly, scale more rapidly, and innovate more frequently, it all leads to a better product for the end-user. And, thanks to the real-time insights you can gain when testing and monitoring in the cloud, you can continuously improve your CX on the fly.
Urgency Is No Substitute for Planning
Given the pressing need for cloud migration, it’s understandable that many contact center executives feel ready to jump in with both feet. Rushing into a change like this is never a good idea, though.
Many executives grossly underestimate the complexity of the cloud migration process. The same leading consumer electronics brand we mentioned earlier was initially shocked by how much more extensive the process was than they had anticipated.
Cloud migration involves much more than simply moving your call infrastructure from one place to another. You’re bringing together disparate legacy systems, migrating enormous amounts of data, and re-mapping your entire customer journey. Even more daunting is the task of integrating departments that may be operating within isolated siloes.
This process is often further complicated by missing data, incomplete documentation, clunky existing manual testing processes, and simple human error. All these unanticipated demands can easily extend your transition timeline by nine months or even a year. As McKinsey reports, companies end up overspending on their cloud migration projects by 14% on average, and many end up reducing the scope of their migration project as a result.†
For contact centers, the costs of a clunky or poor migration go far beyond any budgetary overspend. In this day and age, every customer has a microscope and a megaphone. When you roll out an incomplete CX solution, they’re ready to scrutinize it and share your failures on social media. It could do lasting damage to your reputation.
Charting Your Course to the Cloud
Where does this leave contact center executives who are eager to migrate to the cloud but want to do it with the care and caution it requires? If you’re ready to move toward a CCaaS solution, consider a few keys for assuring a successful migration:
- Map your customer journeys: In contact centers, the starting point for all cloud migration
is to map your existing customer journey so you have a complete picture of everything that needs to be transposed into the new system. If you have thousands of IVR paths, like many companies, this can be incredibly time and labor intensive. It’s faster and more efficient to use an automated testing solution that includes discovery mapping capabilities. Once you’ve mapped these journeys and moved them to the cloud, you can update and optimize freely. - Craft your tests: As you optimize and design new customer journeys, you’ll want to craft a suite of automated regression tests that you can run throughout the migration. Here again, the ideal testing solution can automatically create and update these tests in conjunction with the journey design process.
- Prepare to scale: Realizing this major benefit of cloud migration requires extensive load testing, not just once, but continuously. You need the ability to constantly examine your new network, test it under pressure, and ensure it can scale up to meet your needs.
- Automate testing and monitoring: When they embark on a cloud migration journey, companies like the consumer electronics brand we mentioned quickly discover that this new system demands much more testing monitoring than they’re used to. Manual processes won’t cut it anymore. You’ll need robust automated solutions that can deliver continuous testing and monitoring — during development and in the live production environment.
If you prioritize these four essentials, you’ll have a solid foundation for cloud migration success. Make sure you have the right migration and testing partners in place to ensure you can put these essentials first, and you’ll be well on your way.
Linda Chen |
About the Author:Linda brings 20-plus years of GM and leadership experience across a variety of top-tier multinational branded companies and B2B enterprise SaaS companies. She is the CMO at Cyara, the leading Customer Experience (CX) Assurance provider, leading all aspects of marketing and products. |
Cyara’s award-winning CX Assurance Platform helps companies accelerate customer experience development, increase quality across all digital and voice channels, and assure customer journeys end-to-end. We’ve helped countless brands ensure their cloud migration is a success by delivering automated testing, monitoring, and CX assurance at scale.
Learn more at cyara.com
Footnotes:
* Gartner. “Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service.” Nov. 9, 2020. (Cited here).
† McKinsey and Company. “Cloud-Migration Opportunity: Business Value Grows, but Missteps Abound.” Oct. 12, 2021.
** AVANT. “6-12 Report: CCAAS.” June 2021.
†† Forrester Research, cited in Genesys. “The Not-So-Scare Way To Level Up Your Contact Center.” Oct. 30, 2019
