5 Signs it’s Time to Move to a Cloud Contact Center

Long wait times, uninformed customer service staff, and limited business hours. These are just some of the causes of friction that prevent a smooth customer journey. Any part of your customer service that causes friction is a detriment to your business, and gives your customers all the incentive they need to turn to a competitor.

In order to deliver a frictionless customer experience (CX) – a necessity for boosting brand loyalty and maximizing conversions – building services around your customers is crucial. However, this is easier said than done with an on-premise solution. To trial new services, organizations often need buy, or rebuild environments from scratch.

For a more flexible, and customer-orientated service, you should consider switching to the cloud.

As part of delivering a frictionless CX, your clients should have the ability to begin their experience with your brand on one channel, and continue onto alternative channels seamlessly. Every point in their journey should be visible to your organization, and to the agents servicing them. Treating your channels as independent siloes removes this possibility, and greatly reduces your ability to deliver a quick and connected experience. Having access to management information from a single service layer across all channels will provide the insight required to optimize your customer journeys in real time.

If delivering a seamless experience is as important to your business as it is to your customers, choosing a cloud solution with diverse omni-channel capabilities is an imperative.

Struggling to stay on top of all your integrations and systems? Perhaps complex upgrades, integrating components from different vendors, and constant server maintenance are overwhelming your internal IT staff? These are signs that your current solution is difficult to maintain. It’s very common to have multiple systems working together on different aspects of CX delivery, from reporting and call recording, to email and CRM. Even so, the challenge lies in keeping all these separate islands working together.

If your systems do not integrate well with your solution, or you’re finding it hard to make all of them work in harmony when updating, it’s time to upgrade to the cloud.

“In the decision to upgrade to the cloud, the initial investment into their on-premise solution holds most customers back” comments Jay Choudry, Solutions Consultant at Content Guru.

“The assets associated with an on-premise platform are typically depreciated over a 4-5 year period. Although businesses want to sweat out the asset for as long as possible, the sheer amount of unforeseen costs, such as replacing servers as part of hardware upgrades, infrastructure licensing, hosting costs, and the significant effort to maintain, makes on-premise solutions no longer cost-effective”.

Is cost a key driver in your decision-making process? With cloud contact centers up to 27% cheaper than their traditional counterparts[2], it’s worth exploring a switch to a CCaaS model.

Black swan events such as COVID-19 have shown that on-premise solutions are no longer reliable in a crisis. They cannot scale quickly enough to meet customer demand, or scale seamlessly to support a high volume of home-based workers. This severely disrupts an organization’s ability to deliver its services amidst upheaval.

Businesses have a duty of care to their customers and staff, and scalability is a critical factor to support these initiatives. If your on-premise infrastructure cannot scale to support home-based workers, then your business needs to move to a cloud contact center solution.