Today, the question is not, “should contact centers move to the cloud ?†It is,“how can organizations push the limits of the cloud to be more strategic in nurturing customer and employee experiences?†Ross Daniels, chief marketing officer, Calabrio, discusses why using the cloud to its full potential is imperative to the success of the contact center.
The year 2020 was a testing ground for the contact center. The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically shifted daily routines, forcing business leaders to react quickly and provide the tools and solutions necessary to support employees and customers. For contact centers, like most functions and organizations, that meant shifting how the workforce operates, as many agents began hosting their frontline communications with customers from home. For customers, that meant that they were dealing with contact centers that were in the midst of adopting a sharper, more strategic approach to customer service through cloud-supported technology. But could the transformation to the cloud be the key to unlocking true business potential? For customer service and support organizations, the answer is yes.
To understand the value derived from cloud adoption in 2020 and the potential going forward, Calabrio commissioned the 2021 State of the Contact Center ReportOpens a new window . The study interviewed nearly 300 U.S., U.K., and D.A.CH. contact center leaders and found that a cloud-first approach provided:
- Better workforce and customer engagement
- More flexible scheduling, and
- Easier facilitation of analytics-driven strategies.
In fact, the study reinforced that 75% of contact centers had already made full or partial moves to the cloud, enabling companies to be more strategic and business-oriented. And 68% of those cloud migrations happened over the last year, which shows that while the shift might have been more reactive, the next phase will see the cloud’s importance in optimizing brands for success in 2021 and beyond.
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Cloud Is the Limit(less)
Contact centers grew more critical to business success in 2021. Organizations heavily relied on them to nurture customer relationships through constant change and an evolving workplace, forcing contact centers to transform their business strategy and technology adoption,     entering a Cloud-Smart Era. Through this digital transformation, 25% of contact centers are now fully cloud-based – a substantial jump from less than a year ago, when Calabrio’s 2020 State of the Contact Center survey found just 1 in 10 had fully moved to the cloud.
However, contact centers that remained on-premise found themselves stifled in growth. The 2020 survey saw more than 90% of contact centers investing in social channels, chatbots, or business intelligence platforms to meet rising customer expectations. But their success in these measures was directly related to their cloud maturity. For example, two-thirds of on-premise contact centers say they feel limited by their current solutions. Even half of the contact centers still only partially cloud-based reported that their technology is a barrier, hindering their ability to adapt to this ever-changing landscape.
In other words, contact centers that moved fully to the cloud felt much more confident in their ability to try a variety of innovations and technologies to meet their customers’ rising expectations. The 2021 State of the Contact Center study found that cloud-smart contact centers were twice as likely to have successfully implemented social channels, chatbots and business intelligence platforms and believed that cloud solutions allow for these decisions.
Heads in the Cloud
Meeting the needs of the modern workforce is essential to an operation’s success. Many workers have grown to prefer remote work over traditional on-site operations. And with cloud-based solutions helping deliver better data insights to understand and support employees for increased flexibility and remote working, it is clear that agents are happier in the cloud.
In particular, the 2021 survey found that workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions are the most popular target for cloud transformation over CRM or CCaaS/ACD systems. And more than 60% of cloud-powered contact centers (full or partial) say the cloud has directly increased employee empowerment levels in their organizations. With cloud-based solutions in place, contact centers can provide agents with flexible scheduling, real-time self-service options, more performance feedback, better training, and other tools to succeed in their roles.
The 2020 report found that contact center managers saw the value of employee engagement in terms of customer experience and cost-optimization. And last year, 92% of contact managers said that they were planning to maintain or increase their investments in WEMÂ Â solutions. Today, 9 in 10 contact centers say they are actively using employee engagement data to evaluate and improve their customer experience. As we nurture employee and customer experiences, it is vital to understand their connection.
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A Smarter Approach for Customer Experience
In 2020, contact center leaders recognized the growing demand for analytics insights to help streamline productivity, especially amid rapidly changing customer behaviors. Now more than ever, companies are using the contact center to drive brand loyalty and improve the customer service experience. Through a smarter approach and cloud-enabled technology, centers can rise to meet customer demands and enable AI-driven analytics to help improve agent-customer interactions. For the cloud-smart contact center, analytics will increasingly become a driving force.
Cloud-based technologies make it easier for contact centers to unlock true value within their employee and customer data. And over half of contact center managers who are fully or partially integrated with cloud-based solutions believe it has positively impacted employee and customer data analysis and collaboration with other business areas. In fact, 70% of cloud-powered contact centers say that cloud-based solutions are helping them improve their analytics capabilities. Yet it does seem “seeing is believingâ€. Contact center managers who use on-premise solutions are having a harder time recognizing just how much the cloud could accelerate their analytics efforts, impeding their customer-driven decision-making.
For the cloud-first contact center, data and insights become more accessible, not only increasing visibility across operations but also empowering smarter decision-making within the contact center. As the next phase of cloud transformationOpens a new window moves from a reactive approach, solving urgent business problems, to more proactive strategies for achieving key business goals, questioning the value of the cloud has also shifted. It has evolved from whether contact centers should move to the cloud to how contact centers can fully leverage the cloud to help increase agility, intelligence, and experiences for all.
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