Five steps to success when moving your contact centre to the cloud
By Stéphane Lafrenière, Director, Contact Centre Solutions, Professional Services, Bell Canada
As on-premises contact centre solutions approach end of life, many organizations are now embracing cloud-based contact centre platforms, in what is often known as a contact centre as a service (CCaaS) model. It’s one of the three big drivers we discussed in our previous blog about what’s shaping the future of contact centres.
In many ways, this makes sense. In addition to offering considerable operational and cost benefits, cloud-based contact centre platforms make it easier to access new features without the need for expensive infrastructure upgrades. They can also serve as a pathway to your contact centre transformation and let you further enhance your employee and customer experience with artificial intelligence (AI).
In this blog, I’ll outline steps that will simplify the move of your contact centre to the cloud. We’ll discuss planning, design, deployment, ongoing management and continuous improvement, with particular focus on the advantages of working with an expert partner like our Contact Centre advisory services. Having implemented CCaaS solutions for some of the biggest organizations in Canada – including transforming our own contact centre operations with AI – we bring to the table considerable knowledge and experience to guide your cloud migration journey to ensure a successful transition.
How to migrate contact centre operations to the cloud
1. Review
Take the time to understand your current mode of operation. This includes everything from the processes, people and technologies you‘ve put in place to the objectives that drive your business and any pain points your teams grapple with daily.
Enterprises often skip this step, trying to save time or minimize costs. I strongly recommend this stage as it can often save you more time and money down the line. For example, if you know agent churn is an issue, you can prioritize solutions with features to help improve job satisfaction, which will reduce recruitment and onboarding expenses by keeping staff in their roles longer.
2. Assess and strategize
Based on a clear picture of your current mode of operation, you can design a future that solves your problems and meets your needs. Drill down into the specifics of your potential migration: What kind of customer experience will you offer? Can you minimize any impact to legacy systems? How long will the migration take and how can you organize the work to minimize downtime? What solutions should you consider and what are the pros and cons of each? This lets you select the right partner and platform to make that future real.
Ultimately, any digital transformation project will involve changes across people, processes and technology. Dedicating appropriate time and consideration to each of these areas is vital to the success of your cloud contact centre migration.
3. Create a roadmap
To guide your efforts, create a roadmap that outlines your priorities over the next two to three years. An agile project management approach can facilitate the work and ensure critical items don’t sit in the backlog. Frame the benefits and forecast ROI to get executive buy-in and identify measures of success. All of this will help improve customer experience, empower agents to have more data-driven interactions and drive business outcomes.
Be sure to identify and prioritize quick wins: small tasks that would make a big difference to the day-to-day operation of your contact centre. For instance, if your organization gets more help requests than staff can manage, a web call-back form could help reduce call volumes and create time for specialized agents to handle more complex issues. Automating activities with less value can help allocate agents’ time to more important tasks.
4. Implement
With your roadmap and strategy in hand, the rollout can begin. It takes time and expertise to transform your contact centre so it consistently delivers high-quality experiences. Leveraging the expertise of a partner with deep experience in complex contact centre deployments will help facilitate an easier transition to the cloud. Key aspects an expert can help with include selecting the right solution, training agents, optimizing workflows, ensuring compliance with data security, setting up post-implementation support and more.
This step will also help lay the foundation for a cloud-based contact centre capable of using applied AI and other advanced technologies to deliver powerful omnichannel customer and employee experiences.
5. Monitor and evolve
The journey doesn’t end after the migration. You need ongoing monitoring of key performance indicators (KPIs) you established during the strategy stage, adjusting as necessary to improve results.
You’ll also want to monitor the development roadmap of your chosen solution. Cloud-based platforms evolve over time, so there will likely be new features you want to use. If there are, you’ll need to work those features into your processes and train agents on how to use them.
How an expert partner can support along the way
I’ve seen the value of these five steps when helping Canadian organizations of all sizes migrate to the cloud. Completing them, however, requires expertise and skills that are in short supply in the labour market. Staffed by professionals with in-demand skills and certifications, a partner such as Bell can bridge that skills gap to facilitate a smooth migration to the cloud.
Our bilingual advisory teams dedicate their time to finding you the right solutions, along with planning and strategy support, staff augmentation to supplement your team, and employee training. We’ve built strong relationships with leading CCaaS providers, and our vendor-agnostic approach means you’ll get the best technologies available – integrated into your systems with a single point of contact for support.
We’d love to have a conversation about what moving to the cloud might mean for your specific business needs. Connect with our Professional Services team and get started with your cloud migration today.