Are you a global, multi-center with different contact center platforms across centers? Have you felt the pain of not being able to route your customers across any global center? Are you stuck with multiple reports from various centers but none that gives you the 360-degree view across centers? Do your global customers get inconsistent experiences across your centers? It is time to go all-in and break these silos to deliver a consistent customer experience leveraging your efficiencies in your global contact centers.
Consolidating and unifying global centers is a no brainer for larger global contact centers and cloud helps achieve these benefits, which are not possible in the premise world. However, we still see several companies going on fold-mode and playing the wait game. For all other companies that see the world moving to the cloud and wanting to change, there is the dilemma of whether to go all-in or go one-step at time. More than that, they are not sure which flavor to go for - private cloud, public cloud or hybrid. Should it be CCaaS (contact center as a service) with pre- and purpose-built contact center apps, or should it be API based so you can build everything you want your way?
Here are some guidelines on making that all-in move to the cloud
- Choose the model that best suits your need. Not all cloud is the same. Some of the more popular models are hosted and cloud native. More data sensitive companies look for a hosted option to maintain a dedicated instance. However, they fail to get the benefits of a true cloud native model - agility, flexibility and instant scale. You can get all of these in hosted models but it comes at a cost, effort and time that most businesses do not have. A hybrid model could work well if you have mixed needs.
- Ensure IT is not just productive but innovative. IT is no longer measured on cost and efficiencies and is instead measured on direct business impact. To be innovative, you need a truly open platform with no vendor lock-in. A cloud native platform with open APIs enables you to move away from just keeping the lights on to developing business affecting innovative apps. Not just that, you connect to all apps with much more ease – be it a homegrown app or a new AI app or a common enterprise app where there are pre-built connectors. Customizations become so much easier and limitless. You get the best of both worlds – open API to build what you want and purpose built contact center apps that you can leverage off the shelf.
- Make sure your business users realize the most value. Making your agents and supervisors productive and happy is the single important success metric for IT. With cloud native, supervisors are empowered to act on real time. Simple configurations, on the fly and changes to IVR and routing scripts is all so easy that they do not have to wait on IT. In addition, it becomes possible to do global routing with cloud native platforms, both of which are not possible in the hosted world. Agents feel more motivated with a unified desktop, which is common in cloud native CCaaS applications. Training and onboarding gets easier. Agents feel that they can now focus on their customers, not applications.
Once you are ready, try a pilot to ensure it works well and scale it across all centers. Because, to get true benefits of global multi center situation, it does not make sense to have just one center in the cloud. It is important to consolidate your technology into one single unified platform to ensure global routing, global visibility and consistent experiences.
