Migrating your call center to the cloud – first of a series of 4
With all the buzz about moving on-premise call center systems to the cloud, particularly with all the uncertainty regarding the future of the established on-premise vendors, we thought it would be helpful to create a blog series on the topic. This blog will cover the topic of who should migrate their call center to the cloud.
Each blog will look at the topic from a different perspective. This blog will address who should migrate, future blogs will address why, when and how.
Three kinds of companies can benefit greatly if they migrate their on-premise call center to a cloud-based call center. These are:
- Growing companies
- Companies with expensive and/or outdated legacy equipment
- Companies experiencing business performance issues
If your company is one of these, read on to find out what questions you should ask to discover if migrating to a cloud-based contact center is right for you.
Growing Companies
- Does your call center have varied or peak call volumes?
Some organizations may experience peak call volumes during a seasonal business cycle, and low call volumes the rest of the time. When you need it, it has to be there, but those capital expenditures like maintenance and licensing are still there when the infrastructure is sitting idle. Cloud-based call centers can be ‘pay as you go,’ allowing you to add and remove assets as needed, thus reducing capital expenditures.
- Are you experiencing significant growth?
Companies experiencing significant growth need to be able to extend existing call center capacity on demand – preferably without additional capital expenditures for licenses and equipment. With CCaaS, you can rapidly scale up your call center operation without having to invest in new hardware or architecture.
- Do you want to add additional channels (without adding new internal systems management)?
Does your company want to add such as self-service IVR, ACD, email, chat and social channels to your contact center? This can potentially create a poor customer experience, as customer and interaction data gets spread across multiple systems and is not easily accessible to agents across channels. Managers and administrators can also lose visibility and control across channels. Unified omni-channel call center solutions are available in the cloud to help create a seamless customer experience across channels.
- Do you want to add at-home agents or outsource partners, or use multiple sites?
Do you want to lower operational costs by enabling off-site productivity? It can be difficult and costly to manage and control distributed contact centers to performance goals. Cloud call centers are remotely accessed by agents, and so are naturally easier to implement, manage and control than on-premise call centers.
- Do you have strapped/overused IT resources?
On-premise call centers software are not only expensive to buy and license; they also have ongoing costs for internal resources to manage the technology, maintenance, and upgrades. Cloud-based call center providers generally provide upgrades and new features at no additional cost, and they manage the maintenance.
Companies with Outdated Legacy Call Center Equipment
- Are you concerned about the viability of your current provider of on-premise equipment?
Consolidation in the contact center space is increasing – will your vendor be acquired? What happens to your solution and customer experience if that happens? You could benefit by migrating to a low-risk cloud call center provider with high-profile reference customers.
- Is your current system outdated and will it be expensive to upgrade?
On-premise legacy call center systems are expensive to manage, difficult to maintain, and potentially disruptive to upgrade. By implementing a cloud-based contact center, you can upgrade to a full-featured omni-channel contact center at a much lower cost.
- Are you maintaining too many different contact center systems?
Deployment of multiple point solutions in a contact center reduces agent efficiency and makes management complex and expensive. Cloud call center solutions integrate multiple systems and provide visibility into them.
- Are you questioning the value of expensive legacy system maintenance?
The ongoing costs of maintaining and upgrading on-premise call center software and hardware can be high, and you have to question whether the benefits are worth the expense. CaaS reduces your CapEx costs.
- Do you want to decrease CapEx and have a predictable OpEx?
On-premise call centers are heavy on up-front costs for hardware and licensing, and then have ongoing maintenance costs (mostly capital expenditures). Cloud-based call centers switch this to an operational expenditure, which means a shorter billing cycle, but also predictable (and lower) costs.
- Do you need to integrate several different systems?
It’s difficult to see the big picture when you are getting multiple reports from multiple on-premise call systems across multiple sites. When you migrate to cloud-based contact centers, it is easy to integrate data from disparate systems for better visibility and control.
Companies with Call Center Business Performance Issues
- Are your competitors out-performing you with their more sophisticated contact center infrastructure?
As on-premise legacy call centers are expensive (and potentially disruptive) to upgrade, they can lack some of the best features of newer systems, giving those with the newer systems a competitive edge. Cloud-based call centers give you access to the latest upgrades when they are released, so there is no wait to upgrade and little to no cost.
- Are you having trouble controlling performance and service levels across multiple sites?
Lack of visibility and control across channels makes it difficult to effectively manage operations and performance to meet service level commitments. Once a cloud-based call center is deployed across multiple sites, the CCaaS can automatically balance loads across networks and sites to better utilize resources. And if you see certain sites are overloaded with traffic, you can easily redirect calls and omni-channel interactions to other teams and sites for a better customer experience.
- Is your customer experience inconsistent across sites and partners?
If your agents can’t access key customer information because it is spread across multiple contact center systems, the result can be a poor customer experience. Unified omni-channel cloud-based contact centers can create a seamless customer experience across channels.
- Are you missing key KPIs with existing on-premise systems?
Legacy on-premise call centers often cannot keep up with rapidly growing technology across a growing number of communication channels, causing an inconsistent customer experience. High abandon rates due to long or inconsistent wait times, and not meeting service levels across multiple sites are often the result. Cloud-based call centers should provide the visibility and control needed to optimize business performance across sites and channels.
- Are you missing the big picture because you can’t get reports from multiple systems?
If your on-premise call center system is providing disparate reports and control facilities for each system, you may be missing the visibility, control, and management across channels that you need. Cloud-based contact systems are built with more open and modern APIs for better integration, empowering agents, supervisors, and management to optimize contact center performance.
Whether your company is growing, has an expensive on-premise call center, or is experiencing business performance issues, there are definite benefits to be gained by migrating to the cloud.
If your company is growing rapidly, read more about why companies experiencing significant growth are moving to cloud communications across their organizations.
Learn more about the variety of companies moving to cloud-based call center solutions from SMBs to large enterprises, their use cases and industries.
Check back next week for the next in our series – “why you would want to migrate your call center from on-premise to the cloud”.
