We all know that Santa’s elves build the toys, bake the cookies, and prep the sleigh, but they also spearhead another critical aspect of North Pole operations - wish management. Never heard of it? Well it’s a trendy new term the elves are using to describe their role on the front lines of Santa’s Wish Center, the centralized hub for wish collection, management, and response for nearly 2 billion children around the world.
That’s a lot of Christmas lists, and a lot of data. It’s the ultimate scalability challenge for a technology infrastructure, which is why Kris Kringle moved to the cloud earlier this year. He’s saving sleighloads of money on equipment costs and maintenance, and the elves that used to be responsible for managing servers and hardware have been freed up to do what they do best – making toys. The cloud also enables Santa to ramp up resources during the busy holiday season, without having to pay for upkeep of an on-premise infrastructure during the slow spring and summer months.
The elves in the Wish Center couldn’t be happier because they have access to software upgrades and new features as they become available. For example, automatic wish routing distributes gift requests to the elf with the proper toy-building skills, and wish analytics help Santa identify patterns of demand, and allocate his elves most effectively. This is also the first year that the Wish Center has achieved seamless integration with its Naughty/Nice Relationship Management (NRM) tools, so elves can see wish requests and eligibility information on the same screen.
Always the innovator, Santa manages the entire operation with a mobile app on his iPad, monitoring wish volumes in real-time and coaching elves as challenges arise. Sometimes it’s good to know how the sausage is made, and Santa’s new cloud-enabled Wish Center is a model of efficiency that we can all follow.
Happy Holidays from NICE CXone!
