Many contact centers are finding the value of moving to the cloud. While most companies are doing it in short bits and pieces – dabbling by using cloud-based CRM first before venturing elsewhere – they are finding that the cost savings, broadened functionality and flexibility are worth their time.
Many smaller contact centers, of course, have already moved over to the fully cloud-based contact center platform. It’s a great prospect for them: it provides them with everything they require to offer first-class customer care in a properly integrated package, the administration of which becomes someone else’s worry. But many companies examine the feature sets of these cloud-based solutions as if they are the only consideration. Many companies forget to evaluate the quality of the telecommunications services that underpin their cloud solution.
VoltDelta (News - Alert) blogger Dave McAbee recently wrote that companies ignore this issue at their own peril.
This subject is near and dear to me because I have seen firsthand the impact of overlooking telco (and I am including data bandwidth here too – SIP is still telco) in even small to medium-sized contact centers,” wrote McAbee. “From busy signals and poor call quality to lost calls, companies that rely on their cloud provider to handle their telco without asking some serious questions put themselves at risk of jeopardizing the customer experience.”
McAbee reached out to VoltDelta network engineer John Pecora for advice on the topic. Pecora noted that companies need to consider the quality of their network and ensure it’s robust enough to properly handle the traffic. While putting a more robust and reliable network into place may be expensive, these costs must be weighed against the quality of the customer experience and its values to the business, he said.
“I believe from a technical standpoint that the data and voice transport portion of the cloud solution is often misunderstood or assumed more reliable to some extent due to the virtualized nature of the solution,” Pecora told McAbee. “Cloud technology still has two parts to its reliability, one being the robustness of the cloud center transport and the other being the customer’s access to the cloud environment.”
This is particularly true when companies are using SIP for their data. These companies must ensure they have a reliable network in place from end-to-end, so high call quality can be maintained. Without this important step, organizations investing in cloud-based contact center solutions may find that their money has been ill-spent.
Edited by Alisen Downey