Top 5 Gotchas of Moving to a Cloud Contact Center

"Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts." - Arnold Bennett

"Drawbacks and discomforts" do not sound like fun. Moving from an on-premises contact center to the cloud is a big change. And making the change while minimizing discomfort can be a challenge.

This blog was written by Melissa Swartz, Founder, Swartz Consulting LLC.

"Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts." - Arnold Bennett

"Drawbacks and discomforts" do not sound like fun. Moving from an on-premises contact center to the cloud is a big change. And making the change while minimizing discomfort can be a challenge. As a vendor-agnostic consultant, I've worked with many clients in evolving to a cloud contact center. Here are some pitfalls you can avoid with your migration.

1. Moving your existing setup to the new cloud platform. This can be tempting. If you have good documentation on your existing system, it's relatively easy to just take that and build it in a cloud environment. However, in the long run, this can cause issues.

First, the new solution will (almost always) offer capabilities you don't have in the current system. If you move your contact center as-is to the new platform, you'll be missing out on the benefits these new capabilities offer. Opportunities could include:

• Additional self-service options for customers
• New channels for customer interactions
• Addition of, or improvement to, voice and digital bots
• Workflow automations
• Summarization capabilities
• Easier access to customer history information
• Speech analytics and emotion detection
• Agent assist
• Improved reporting

A move to a new solution is an opportunity to look at ways to improve your current operation. You can optimize the design of your contact center to remove roadblocks and inefficiencies.

Don't miss out on realizing the full benefits of the new solution. It takes more work up front for a redesign, but the long-term benefits of a digital transformation can be huge.

2. Migrating to the cloud too quickly. Sometimes it's necessary to migrate to a cloud solution quickly. But if your situation allows it, a slower pace can be better.

In a large contact center, there are many stakeholders to consider, such as:

• Contact center agents
• Supervisors
• Analysts
• Quality assurance staff
• Contact center management
• Upper management
• IT support
• Marketing
• Customer experience team

Each of these groups will have to learn new ways to work, new capabilities, and new systems to administer and support.

Customer service agents and supervisors will have a lot of new processes and tools to absorb, such as:

• A new user interface for the contact center application itself
• Changes in the way information is presented to them
• Understanding changes in call flows and self-service options
• Learning new capabilities like call summarization or other new tools
• A new interface for monitoring real-time conditions
• A new way to generate historical reports

It's a lot.

Your move to the cloud should only progress at the pace that the slowest stakeholder can support.

It's often a good strategy to introduce changes in phases, to limit the amount of "newness" that has to be absorbed at any one time.

For example, a migration strategy could start with a move to the new solution, without any additional capabilities. Once the teams have adjusted, new tools (call summarization, reporting metrics, process automation, speech analytics, etc.) can be added in one at a time.

3. Lack of foundation for reporting. Customer and employee experience are very important aspects of system design. It's also critical to be able to measure them.

It's been said that "data is the new gold," and contact centers collect A LOT of data. There can be information on customer sentiment and behavior, and insights into product problems or common questions.

If data is the gold of the contact center, then reporting is the way to mine the gold. Insights can be extracted from the data and used to make improvements in products and customer experience.

Gaining these insights is only possible if the reporting mechanism is in place. The design of the new solution must include points of measurement throughout a process. In the Genesys Cloud™ platform, these are called "milestones," and they're inserted into the system to measure activity at that point.

Here's a simple example: A customer enters a call flow at a point that contains a milestone. They're offered a menu of options - and each option also contains a milestone.