By Scott Hoffpauir, Managing Partner

Today’s enterprise-grade contact centers are sophisticated and highly customized to create differentiating customer experiences (CX) and nurture customer loyalty, maximize employee performance, and keep the costs manageable. Usually, CX organizations have gradually built their solutions over the years or gone through the pain of changing their existing solution altogether. As we mentioned in Mike’s blog, he addresses the ways of incrementally adding capabilities to upgrade existing solutions. For many companies, it has been a challenging journey over many generations of technologies, organizational transformations, and brand evolution.

So, while every major enterprise contact center is a unique solution, they do have a few common qualities. These environments span multiple geographies and utilize heterogeneous components, including multiple channels, customer self-service, interaction routing, reporting and analytics, quality management, employee training, telephony and data connectivity. 

To remain competitive, CX organizations need to innovate in order to elevate customer experience, modernize employee engagement, maximize performance, and improve economics. One catch, though - innovation almost always means “cloud”. 

Transitioning to the cloud allows your business to (1) focus on your core competency instead of managing the infrastructure and (2) realize stronger economics due to consumption-based pricing and negligible upfront investments. Effectively the cloud enables you to accelerate innovation.

Every major brand today has a version of a cloud migration strategy, and yet the vast majority (over 80%) of the enterprise call center agent seats are still on-premises. Major companies are reluctant to leave their custom and expensive legacy products behind. As much as enterprises would love to migrate their call centers to the cloud, the “lift and shift” to the new CCaaS platforms aren’t an easy option at scale.

Why? On one hand, different buying cycles, peculiar contract terms, differing organizational jurisdictions, compliance requirements, and the need to maintain uninterrupted operation require a phased migration. On the other hand, CCaaS platforms are still catching up feature-wise, offer limited customization options, and their multisite, global reach / global routing story has plenty of room for improvement.

Then, what are the strategies to embrace Cloud without creating a major disruption for your CX operation? The answer is “go hybrid”. 

There are five visible trends. 

1. Introduction of AI/ML-enabled capabilities: real-time and post-call text and speech analytics, speech and chat bots, speech synthesis, and background noise reduction. These AI technologies are almost exclusively available from the cloud and are getting more affordable every day.

2. Adding modern customer engagement channels from the cloud such as: video, multi-party conferences, social media, over-the-top messaging, and co-browse. 

3. Extending or replacing isolated legacy modules with next-generation cloud-based technologies such as: IVR, chat, quality management, employee/agent education, collaboration solutions and compliance interaction recording (it is a commodity feature and with cloud storage, like Amazon S3 it is a fantastic cost saver!).

4. Deploying new or moving specific CX organizational units to the CCaaS solutions (like Amazon Connect or Genesys Cloud) and federating them with the rest of the organization using middleware, preferably available from the same vendors (for example, Amazon Chime SDK). 

5. Optimization of the communication infrastructure, including telephony and data connectivity resulting in a large return-on-investment, as this is usually one of the costliest parts of operation!

In summary, you don’t necessarily have to “rip and replace” your multisite, multi-vendor contact center environment to innovate and stay on top of the CX game. Cloud migration on your own terms is possible, and you have options to embrace the innovation from the cloud without disrupting your customer and employee experiences. We’d love to hear from you on your cloud migration experiences.