Mistakes to Avoid When Moving Your Contact Center to the Cloud

The contact center has traditionally operated through on-premises servers and software, but shifting it to the cloud can help CIOs improve the customer journey. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud-based contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) options now give enterprises more confidence that they can better deliver high-quality customer experiences.

However, there are potential challenges around moving contact center services, especially if the business has spent years cultivating good relationships with its customers. For many organizations, even a 1% drop in the performance of an Intelligent Voice Response (IVR) system can result in a surge of support calls for live agents, who are already under enormous pressure due to workforce shortages.

Here are the top three factors to consider before migrating your contact center to the cloud:

• Avoid a rush to the cloud: Contact center software that has been optimized over the years cannot simply be rewritten and moved to a new CCaaS platform. Specific and careful planning must take place to keep optimizations intact and avoid breaking the customer experience. For example, many systems have carefully constructed call flows, routing rules, and natural language libraries featuring customer terminology. Those were refined over time and can’t be immediately replicated in a new system from day one.
  
• Ensure portability to avoid vendor lock-in: Several CCaaS providers offer services that utilize a specific cloud host, making them inflexible. Any cost savings from moving contact center software to the cloud could be negated if an enterprise decides to change cloud providers due to market or technology changes, mergers, or other events. Choosing the right CCaaS provider means looking for options that are cloud-agnostic, as well as nimble enough to move should the need arise.
  
• Enable AI systems that can handle demand spikes or other changes: New technologies that integrate natural language processing and machine learning algorithms can provide flexibility for companies experiencing an influx of new customer interactions. AI software that can learn with each customer engagement helps to ensure that the system recognizes the optimal action for the next customer who inquires about a new topic. For example, early in the pandemic, banking institutions needed to add messages about lobby closures and longer hold times, but many companies began receiving inquiries about stimulus check status that the system couldn’t quickly answer. A solution that can recognize new questions from customers and quickly react with answers is one of the benefits of an AI system that is constantly learning.

Careful planning combined with a strategy that continually prioritizes the customer experience will enable enterprises to achieve a smooth, optimized, and efficient transition to the cloud. IT leaders should partner with well-established experts to guarantee the best experience in that transformation.

To learn more about open, extensible, and collaborative contact center solutions, explore the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform powered with Nuance AI, Teams, and Dynamics 365, here.