Competitive onslaught, cost pressures, and technology innovations are driving businesses to demand greater functionality from IT. CRM, marketing automation, social media, web platforms, video, and mobile are just a few areas of focus. Companies today require inbound or multichannel functionality to maintain competitive service levels and differentiated client experiences. These market demands are moving call centers to Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platforms to remain competitive.
CCaaS offers a compelling value proposition. These call center cloud services provide flexibility, scalability, and cost management that on-premise contact centers cannot match. A typical on-premise contact center is built on static assumptions about the number of agents, volume of customer interactions, and channels or features each agent requires.
CCaaS allows contact centers to scale agents up or down as demand changes, provides better business intelligence, and adapts to business demand without IT-supported infrastructure.
Many market leaders have moved call centers to a cloud-based IT solution. Others have a cloud migration foisted on them by executive orders, a firm-wide digitization initiative, a forced hardware upgrade, competitive response, or severe pressure to reduce costs with a cloud-based solution. Some businesses outright resist cloud migration. Understanding the catalyst for migration is important because it dictates early strategic steps.
A Proven Approach to Migrate Legacy Customer Contact Center Technology to CCaaS
What Causes CCaaS Implementations
IT Demand
CCaaS Implementation usually start due to one of two reasons. Then first common reason are IT-led events that are software or hardware upgrades, top-down cloud first strategies, or the legacy network software that has become too unwiedly.
Business Demand
The second type of event, a business-led event. A business-led event includes a need for more insight into business drivers and performance metrics. These can include: workforce optimization, agent retention or agent effectiveness. Additionally business-led events can include the demand for a unified customer experience that requires an omnichannel functionality to be added quickly
Whatever the catalyst, moving a call center to the cloud is unlike email, CRM, Marketing or HR systems. It requires a different approach for success. Traditional thinking can lead to the major pitfalls that can cause a CCaaS implementation to fail, end careers, alienate customers, increase agent turnover, squander political capital, and cost organizations a lot of time, money, and resources.
