The cloud will continue to grow in private, public, and hybrid models. There’s no doubt that contact centers currently running on local platforms will have to move to the cloud sooner or later.

The question is, will they move in good time? Or continue to lose ground to organizations that were quicker to realize the importance of cloud tools.

Cloud Contact Center software is an excellent choice in situations including:

• When a new contact center has to get up and running quickly and their requirements are not complex
• When an existing contact center uses technology that is eight+ years old and needs to be moved before the contact center can meaningfully develop its service
• When a sales team needs to manage multi-channel communication through a call center CRM and provide support across all channels

A Checklist for Contact Centers Cloud Migration

In today's customer-centric and highly competitive marketplace, businesses must keep pace with changing needs and preferences to ensure brand loyalty.

Many businesses use call center solutions to respond to customer inquiries and manage customer service issues. An interruption of the network connection with these contact centers can reduce customer loyalty and loss of business.

The need for high-quality service is even more critical to the business's life, as call centers usually provide support to customers in stressful or frustrating situations. If customers who are already dissatisfied with a call to the call center hang up or lose their connection, they can become more dissatisfied and offer their business to competitors.

There are many benefits to migrating a contact-center from local hardware to the cloud, including improved cost structure, increased flexibility, more straightforward configuration, faster deployment time, and outsourcing of hosting and maintenance of sites and distributed agents. Additionally, cloud-based contact centers can reduce the IT team's workload and focus resources on other strategic plans to increase revenue.

The Contact Center Migration Process

1. Evaluate the Current Call Center

It might sound obvious, but it's easy to miss it. First, track the most difficult and time-consuming processes to understand how cloud tools are going to help.

You’ll also need to review the communication channels you use. Do you support call center services like chat, self-service, email, social media, and SMS? If so, will you be able to migrate all of them, or is a staggered approach best?

2. Plan for the Future

If implemented poorly, the best techniques and ideas will fail. So what do you need to plan for cloud migration?

As with any organizational commitment, focus on assessable targets that can increase efficiency and productivity, such as Handling time, Wrap-up time, and Average Speed of Answer.

Remember, 16% of the time between the agent and the client is spent finding information about the client. Your goal is to reduce that number as much as possible.      

3. Set Realistic Goals and Anticipate Challenges

Understanding the needs of the contact center is something IT managers can help with. Planning provides oversight and structure to help IT and customer service teams get on track during the transition. For best results, you should include step-by-step migration milestones in your plan and resolve the following issues:

1. When and how will the transition situation be communicated internally to employees?
2. Which features should you migrate first, and why?
3. How should you communicate service changes to customers and partners to ensure the transparency of changes and delays?
4. What type of training will you offer to employees?

4. Find an Associate To Migrate your Contact Center To the Cloud

A trusted associate can tell you what will work and what won’t. Talk to an expert who understands the cloud transition, integration and network availability.

When selecting the right associate to help you migrate to the cloud, consider the following factors:

• Security
• Support
• Size
• Scope

The right associate will advise you and ensure the technological solutions you choose meet your planned business goals and provide you the trust and technology you need to make the right moves.

About babelforce

babelforce is a global cloud communications platform focused on No-Code integration and automation. It allows non-technical people to build even the most complex integrated processes for customer-facing teams, particularly in the call center.