It’s no wonder that according to Gartner, over 95% of businesses will use cloud computing by 2025. With an incredibly rapid growth adoption rate, cloud computing will become the centrepiece of the new digital experience.

When migrating your contact center from on-premises to the cloud, key considerations include:

 

Make sure your contact center is ready for the cloud

Seems obvious but does your contact center solution have the necessary infrastructure in place to support your cloud contact center needs? Do you have the resources, budget, and plan to execute a cloud migration? Your contact center stakeholder team will need a clear understanding of its business processes and be able to understand how they will be impacted by the move to the cloud. To support this, they’ll need to determine the business processes that are critical for operations, which processes can be modified, and which processes can be eliminated.

Find the best cloud solution for your contact center’s requirements

There are a lot of different cloud solutions on the market. How do you know which one is best? The answer lies in understanding your contact center’s specific needs and requirements. What type of customer traffic do you typically handle? How many contact center agents do you require? Are they remote or in-person? Do you require any special features or functionalities? Once you have answers to these and many other important questions, you can start to narrow down your options and find the best cloud solution for your contact center.

Migration planning and execution

Now that you’ve selected the right cloud solution for your contact center, it’s time to start planning the actual migration. This is where things can start to get tricky. You need to have a clear understanding of your current infrastructure and how it needs to be configured for the new cloud solution. What components need to be migrated? What data needs to be migrated? How will you migrate your contact center agents? What training needs to occur for the new system? Working with a certified implementation partner can help seamlessly guide the migration process.

As you can see, there are many important factors to consider when migrating to the cloud.  But if you take the time to plan and execute carefully, you can make the transition with minimal disruptions and see significant long-term benefits for your business.

Let’s take a look at three critical things you should never overlook when migrating to a cloud contact center solution

 

1. The contact center should prepare for change – because everything will change

The way your contact center operated with your existing on-premises contact center solution, will not be the same with a new solution – as it has undoubtedly improved or modified how it delivers a cloud experience. The more your business team is open to change, to adopt best practices in their cloud contact center migration, the more successful you will be at setting yourself up with a platform that delivers your future business needs. The term “like for like” can become a slippery slope when taken literally for business functionality and should be clarified by the business team in the context of the supporting business processes identified as critical, can be modified, or can be eliminated.

2. The cloud evolves rapidly and can outpace your business

It’s important to keep this in mind when migrating to the cloud and planning for business expansion. The cloud is constantly improving with new features and functionality being released regularly. It’s important to have a plan in place to take advantage of these new functionalities as they become available. Doing so will ensure that your contact center is always up-to-date and able to take advantage of the latest and greatest technology. Sometimes, this means that contact channels are being deprecated in favor of newer, more relevant ones.

3. If your contact center infrastructure is managed internally, your team will need to adopt a new mindset

You’ll no longer have to buy and manage servers, maintain backups and redundancy anymore! Imagine not having to buy servers, updating operating systems and applications, decommissioning and disposing of obsolete hardware… all this is taken care of virtually so that you remain focused on obtaining business objectives and managing the needs of your contact center organization.

 

Don’t overlook these factors that can make or break your contact center’s success when migrating to the cloud. Plan ahead, be open to change and always stay current with the latest technology. By doing so, you’ll be sure to set your contact center up for success.