Contact Center Cloud Migration Guide: Overcoming Top Cloud Migration Challenges for Contact Centers

Why Contact Centers are Moving to the Cloud

It’s a new, digital world. The global pandemic forced enterprises to embrace remote work as a norm. Organizations have thrived for decades with their team on-site, and many were forced to make quick decisions to enable their contact center staff to work remotely. Chris Howe, President of Limitless Connect shares, “They spent 30 years trying to keep people in the building and they had 30 days to get everyone out.” This rapid and dramatic shift has led many enterprises to rethink their technology strategies going forward.

There are several challenges that drive enterprises to consider shifting to cloud-based strategies:

Scalability is needed: For enterprises tackling global expansion, on-premise contact center expansion is time consuming and costly. Infrastructure is expensive to deploy and maintain, and lacks scalability.

Uptime requirements are critical. On-premise deployments can be a reliability nightmare when things go wrong. Outages and downtime cripple operations that rely on real-time availability and create poor customer experiences.

Keeping the lights on is consuming. Many on-premise systems are either no longer supported or are coming close to the end of their life support. And in many cases, bringing outdated on-premise contact centers up to par can cost prohibitive.

Modern technology demands more horsepower. Legacy infrastructure is unable to sufficiently support modern data needs, automation, and AI/ML workloads. Many legacy systems are difficult to integrate with other tools in order to share data, resulting in data silos and poor reporting.

Adapting to demand is a differentiator. It’s difficult to quickly scale up or scale down on-premise contact centers based on fluctuating customer demand.

Meeting customers where they are requires digital experience. Legacy tools don’t natively support the types of omnichannel digital communications via apps and the web that today’s consumers are beginning to prefer.

Cloud based strategy and tools enable contact centers to overcome these challenges, thereby increasing flexibility, scalability, and stability while being cost-efficient. A successful solution will provide these benefits to the contact center:

• Improve customer experience by serving customers faster, with more data at agents’ fingertips;
• Quickly respond to agent needs and improve their experience at work;

56% of IT decision-makers say they’re unsure how to assess optimal deployment for cloud applications.

•  Implement agent scoring tools to help with training;
• Educate their team members on new tools, cloud monitoring, and cybersecurity;
• Reduce costs by shedding the overhead demands of on-premise contact centers;
• Be prepared to quickly expand globally for supporting international business opportunities;
• Utilize modern contact center technology, including AI and omnichannel communication solutions, to meet the needs and preferences of today’s consumers;
• Monitor and test the functionality of cloud apps;
• Remain compliant with PCI, HIPAA, SOCII requirements and up-to-date with certifications;
• Scale (up or down) quickly to meet increasing or decreasing customer demands.

Success in these areas should result in efficiencies gained, a positive financial impact, and a competitive advantage for contact centers. Both your customers and customer service agents will have a higher level of satisfaction, ultimately helping your organization reach (and exceed) its goals.

Tips for Tackling Challenges Head On

Start with a roadmap
56 percent of IT decision-makers say they’re unsure how to assess optimal deployment for cloud applications. Without a proper roadmap, problems can arise with service disruption, performance, availability or uptime, security, compliance, and cost.

Clear business objectives are key to your strategic migration roadmap. Defined business goals, opportunities for automations and AI, and customer needs will help you prioritize and assess the features and functions that your cloud platforms must provide. Identify your KPIs, data sources, communication channels, and ideal workflows to tailor your solution to meet your unique business needs.

The roadmap should include a strategy for training/retraining on any new tools, as well as identify which business processes will need to be updated. Evaluating processes impacted by migration is key to supporting implementation and launch of programs.

Don’t try to “boil the ocean”
A common barrier to migration and/or challenge with roadmap planning is trying to do too much at the outset. It can be daunting to try to integrate new communications channels, develop AI-enabled workflows, and create complex reporting dashboards all at the same time. To avoid this challenge, follow these three steps:

1. Start small: As part of your roadmap development, envision the customer experience you want to deliver, and then determine a stepwise approach to get there. Start your migration with basic workflows that are easy to transition and give you a starting point for agent training.
2. Take an iterative approach: Once you have migrated your basic workflows, focus on buildable changes that add value for your agents, customers, and create movement towards your overall business objectives. 51% of IT decision-makers say they struggle with maintaining security profiles for cloud and hybrid workloads.
3. Strategically tackle the technology: As you continue to migrate into your new cloud-based workflows, assess and identify where automation and AI-driven workflows can be implemented to best strategic effect.

Prioritize security requirements

Proper measures are needed to avoid cloud security risks. In fact, 51% of IT decision-makers say they struggle with maintaining security profiles for cloud and hybrid workloads.

Critical data and applications can reside across multiple data center and cloud environments and each point of interconnection is a potential security weak point.

Contact centers should consider each integrated system they will share data with each other through the cloud. Assess the security implications of data storage and exchange and make sure each is secured using best practices. It is critical to secure customer communication channels and ensure customer data is protected.

This is an ideal chance for you and your organization to critically assess your current data insecurity and map in how you will resolve these issues as you migrate. By maintaining the highest standards of security you remain compliant while retaining customer trust. In short, security needs to be your number one priority, and availability/ reliability coming in second.

AI needs tuning to be effective
One of the key benefits of moving to the cloud is improved ability to leverage customer self-service options driven by AI-intelligence. Even with AI, these resources and tools must be built out thoughtfully and with the customer experience in mind. Poorly built IVR systems and chatbots that fail to understand or answer basic questions frustrate customers and can drive them away.

On the flipside, Artificial intelligence and machine-learning can add great value when built out effectively. As you build out your roadmap, you must look very closely at this element of the customer experience and be very clear in your goals. Have a clear vision of the “low hanging fruit” problems that chatbots and automated systems can easily solve. After moving into the cloud, you can leverage machine-learning to build better support models based on your customers’ most common queries and problems.

Cost efficiency requires cost management
While the cloud has a low cost of entry, left unmanaged, costs can skyrocket. 53 percent of IT decision-makers say they struggle to manage the cost of running cloud applications. This is typically the result of not moving cloud workloads to alternate vendors once they’re deployed, which can lead to higher costs. Cloud services and applications require constant monitoring and assessment for fit and function.

Agent support is key
Your new solutions and tools are only as good as your agents’ ability to use them. Without an agent training/retraining program in place, organizations will struggle to implement efficient workflows and effectively manage omnichannel communications. Opportunities to upskill are important no matter your infrastructure, but are especially critical when preparing for a major overhaul of your agent toolsets.

Your agents need to have buy-in and understanding not only of new tools but also updated processes – it is critical that your processes make sense and that workflows are smooth. Utilize your best resource to understand agent frustrations by taking time to listen to them as you develop your strategy.

As you map out your AI workloads, think about the agent experience and how intelligent tools can benefit them in their work. Real-time speech analysis can help them identify and solve customer needs faster, and immediate feedback helps both agents and managers identify knowledge or training gaps and opportunities.

After Migration – Maintaining Success in the Cloud

Once your contact center has migrated to the cloud, the following activities will help your contact center maintain success in the cloud:

1. Optimizing systems and processes for working in the cloud – eliminating outdated processes and replacing them with processes that work for the cloud environment;
2. Tweaking the tools and applications that you use in the cloud for the best fit for your organization;
3. Leveraging AI in the cloud – continue to assess and identify opportunities for AI-driven workflows to improve customer handling and self-service or automated support;
4. Training and retraining contact center staff to help them better understand the cloud and specific tools, with continued opportunities for upskilling;
5. Monitoring the cost of working in the cloud even with the expectation of cloud apps producing cost savings compared to on-premise solutions.
6. Reporting and Dashboarding – monitor your progress by leveraging advanced reporting made possible through integrating and unifying your data in the cloud to track critical KPIs and success metrics.

The key to success in the cloud for your contact center is to have a strategic plan ahead of time and to follow the roadmap you create. When you are clear on your goals for your contact center and overall business objectives, you can select the tools and platforms that will support the unique needs of your business and customers. Migrating your contact center to the cloud is a multi-step, iterative process that can provide the flexibility, scalability, and stability you need to grow while providing cost efficiencies unmatched by self-hosted solutions. The key is finding the right fit solutions partner to help your organization succeed.

SuccessKPI is uniquely positioned to solve the challenges that contact centers face with cloud migration. It’s our goal to improve your business outcomes and help your agents do the best job with serving your customers.