Cloud, Cloud, What Cloud do You Choose?

The term cloud computing dates back to 2006. Fast forward and there has been a phenomenal growth and evolution in this space. Every business understands the cloud imperative and their enterprise stack has very many flavors of cloud. Contact centers have traditionally been slow in cloud adoption, currently about 49% of contact centers have some form of cloud infrastructure. But, we do see the inflection point soon, where cloud will be overtaking premise. As contact center and IT leaders look for migration to cloud, the options are far more than ever – from the most evolved to the least evolved forms that have been popping up over a decade now.

Here are some key considerations as you look to move your contact center to the cloud model.

What are my cloud options?

Though many flavors of cloud have evolved, a few stand out as core options. The first step companies generally take in moving to any cloud form is keeping everything within your enterprise boundary wall and moving them to an internal cloud. The next stage probably is to see if you can eliminate the IT overhead on set up, maintenance and upgrades and have a 3^rd party host and manage your applications. The provider dedicates servers for the company and it a single tenant system where a single instance of software and infrastructure supports a single customer. The next evolved option is SaaS or cloud native where it is truly multi-tenant and a single instance of software and infrastructure can support multiple customers. And, there is the hybrid option which is any combination of cloud and prem options. There is evolution and nuances in the technology core like containerization, micro service architecture and others. But it is good to start with these broad categories.

Which one of these cloud options would best fit my needs?

One of the most sought after models is cloud native because it leverages economies of scale and scope giving instant upgrades and eliminating infrastructure refresh and maintenance costs. It provides an open platform to innovate and integrate effortlessly. Research from Aberdeen shows great benefits for contact centers with a cloud native model – 17% improvement in customer life time value (CLTV), 3X more than hybrid cloud; 10% improvement in first call resolution (FCR), 4X more than private cloud and 14% improvement in interactive voice response (IVR) completion rate, 9X more than hosted. Not just that cloud native delivers great value for IT by eliminating the need to focus on keeping lights on and channeling it build innovative apps that you can easily build on an open cloud native platform. But not all contact centers are the same. Some with very high data security mandates, tend to take applications into internal cloud or hosted models. But it is important to weigh that in the light of far evolved security standards and extra ordinary investment from the cloud players.

How can I get the best value from cloud?

It is interesting to note that a lot of companies move to the cloud, thinking it is all done. But the main success lies in ensuring every other component lines up to leverage cloud. Best in class organizations achieve far higher returns aligning various other aspects. An example could be that you schedule 300 agents in Jan, but you need to have good forecasting to see if it can be less this time, say 200 agents. In the absence, you might still schedule for 300 agents get them logged in and pay for subscription even though with cloud you could have easily avoided paying for the 100, if you have better forecasting systems. Bringing customer data together, leveraging analytics to generate timely and accurate visibility into performance and making sure you test the cloud capabilities can help accelerate getting true financial results from cloud deployments.

Learn about the right cloud model for your contact center and make the move to cloud, now. Or you can join our educational session on March 26 Choosing the Right Cloud Model for your Contact Center to learn the pros and cons.