Call Center Management Featured Article
The Need to Prepare for Cloud Migration
Being enthusiasts of everything related to information technology, readers here have certainly heard of the primary benefits of migrating to the cloud. Businesses, they have heard, can lower their operational costs, increase their efficiency, and give products and services a chance to scale with their growth.
All of those factors come into play when considering the adoption of cloud-based service or the creation of cloud-based goods as a service provider. A recent blog post from Aspect (News - Alert), however, says those main factors do not tell the whole story. It recently mentioned appropriate research from Aberdeen – out of its report, “STATE OF THE CLOUD CONTACT CENTER 2016: RAISING THE BAR FOR HAPPIER CUSTOMERS” – that asserts the importance of multi-channel communications capabilities, proper collection of business-wide information sets, advanced analytics and reporting, and disaster recovery. It is those elements for which businesses should prepare themselves if they wish to have a successful migration to the cloud.
It is important to dig a little deeper here. First, consider that the cloud can make it easier to gain multiple channels of communication. Hosted software that takes advantage of IP-PBX (News - Alert) or WebRTC may allow this to happen, and all voice, video, chat, and data channels can find a central dashboard in the cloud that IT admins can sort with a careful eye. Then, businesses, make sure that all managers and agents have a single view of how they wish to address customers. Aspect suggests that businesses can interact with customers in the same basic ways to determine which channels fit them best. Once a business knows a customer’s preference, it can continue to address that individual in the correct channel.
Cloud-based contact centers, to continue this example, also have the ability to collect customer data into accessible silos. Businesses will want to prepare their agents for further interaction with customers as that data begins to pile up. Agents can see information such as past purchase history, satisfaction ratings, and preferred channels in a single agent dashboard. Business should make this data easy to see and retrieve – all possible within contact center software.
Managers also have a clear stake in this game. By utilizing cloud-based software, they could have access to better analytics and reporting tools. Therefore, the business should make sure they understand the importance of these advanced tools. In many cases, reports can be generated in real time to address business interactions as they happen. Managers can see live agent performance next to graphs that show performance over time. This can give them a clear picture of what they must do to keep operations running smoothly.
Finally, cloud-based applications can also find security in redundancy. They are often hosted on multiple servers at once so, when one part of the infrastructure fails, data will not be lost. Managers must be trained to understand how these redundancies work so they can interact with IT admins in any sort of emergency. Disaster recovery plans may never be necessary, but their creation represents a small step that can offer big results in case their need ever arises.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi