A contact center cloud migration will have you juggling many moving parts. You have an existing tech stack (okay, so that part might not move so much) to consolidate, stakeholders to reassure, and, above all, customers to keep happy. Minimal disruption to service is essential, as is easy onboarding for contact center agents.
Luckily, with the right tools and an effective plan, you can ensure that the transition is smooth and result-yielding. Of course, you’ll have to consider whether you want to integrate into the cloud fully, or if you’ll be going hybrid and bringing some of your existing infrastructure along with you. Your organization’s goals will ultimately determine your future contact center environment.
Why move your contact center to the cloud?
An on-prem contact center naturally has limitations, and eventually, they will affect your ability to compete.
The cloud eliminates the need for hardware investment in most cases, making it more cost-effective upfront while increasing flexibility. Decreased operational costs enable you to invest more in developing new solutions or aspects of your business that directly impact the customer experience. These advantages also impact productivity, aligning with existing technologies, such as your CRM, and helping agents to troubleshoot more easily.
The cloud gives your business agility to scale as needed while offering a safer environment for your data and future-proofing the infrastructure that you’re building your business on. Another important benefit of a cloud-based contact center is that it provides access to a global talent pool by facilitating remote work. Better people mean better opportunities and efficiencies for your contact center.
How to migrate with confidence
Of course, the biggest challenge is achieving a smooth transition to the cloud. Thankfully, there are precautions and strategies you can apply to ensure the process is effective and minimally disruptive. Here are the steps you should follow:
1. Plan for the future
How will your business evolve in three, five, or ten years? Use current IVR data to understand the requirements for your new contact center environment and how it will serve the needs of customers in the future. Looking at things from your customer’s viewpoint will help you document the existing journey for replication and optimization purposes.
2. Make data-based decision
Optimize your customer’s journey by understanding the data. What are the current indicators showing you about areas in need of improvement? Now is the time to address those issues and monitor the solutions you implement to ensure that they have the desired effect.
3. Test and review
Functional and regression tests are essential to ensuring that a new system is not only performing as expected but also meets your customers’ expectations. Automated testing can be a great help in finding the errors before they’re released into a live environment. Find out how our migration verification testing helped a well-known multinational enterprise software company achieve deployment success with our experience testing system here.
4. Launch and deploy
Now that you’re reassured about your design, it’s time to move into the production environment. Launch and deploy your new system with confidence by making use of an automated testing tool to ensure that systems are operating to specification.
5. Review, improve, maintain
Contact center cloud migration doesn’t stop at the point of deployment. Take some time to review your system after its first few weeks of operation and identify areas for improvement. Automated monitoring will ensure the continued stability of your entire infrastructure and enable improvements over time, using data collected from monitoring.
Cloud migration is a big decision for any organization. You need the right strategy and implementation plan in place before making the leap. Download our free contact center cloud migration guide today and go through our extensive checklist to ensure your migration stays on track and completes successfully.
