As the new decade unfolds, it’s fair to say every business is either actively deploying the cloud, or planning for it. What was once a leap of faith for moving on from time-tested premises-based technology, has now become a central strategy for competing in the digital economy. For something that’s become so important for businesses of all sizes, it’s worth noting that the cloud is a relatively abstract concept.
We all know that to varying degrees, the cloud is about having services and applications hosted and/or managed by a technology partner remotely. They will likely reside in more than one physical location – usually a data center – away from where your operations are located. Unless you go to visit those data centers in-person, you can’t really see or touch the cloud, but your data is “thereâ€, wherever that may be.
This is a very different reality than the world of legacy technology, which remains largely in place, and is the frame of reference for how IT decision-makers think about things. The physical nature of hardware – such as phone systems – makes them very real, and you have a clear sense of what they can and cannot do. By comparison, the “cloud†seems so ephemeral, but its impact is very real.
Think about what the cloud enables, not what it is
I’m writing this post primarily for those who are on the fence with the cloud or those not sure how it can really help your business. There are certainly good reasons to be skeptical of the cloud’s capabilities or have questions of trust over the security of your data. Performance aside, IT has to consider the trade-offs that come with giving up control when elements of their domain shift offsite to a place they may never visit.
These types of concerns may be valid, but they reflect an IT-centric way of thinking about technology that is not in step with what drives business success in 2020. The needs of IT must always be considered, but for many businesses, there are now higher priorities, especially becoming more employee-centric, as well as more customer-centric. This reflects a more holistic view of the business, where happy employees make for happy customers, and when that equation is in balance, all levels of performance will be higher.
At the far end of the value chain, customer satisfaction is paramount for all businesses. We all know that customer expectations have changed, largely due to technology, and delivering a great CX – customer experience – is the new lens through which the contact center must pass. The reasons why would require a separate series of posts, but the main implication here is that businesses need cloud capabilities for those great CXs to happen.
This alone should be enough of a driver for cloud – and what it enables – but there’s more to consider. In the consumer world, purchasing habits have shifted, and people are buying/consuming more services and fewer products. The value proposition is increasingly being framed by the experience around consuming the service than the inherent value of the service itself. This is rapidly fanning out to products as well, even for everyday purchases like coffee. Going to your local Starbucks, for example, is just as much about the in-store experience around getting your morning coffee as the coffee itself.
What does coffee have to do with collaboration?
Digital natives in particular are being conditioned to define value based on their experiences, and this filters all the way back to IT. Contact centers need to deliver a great CX because experiences are becoming the fulcrum for how consumer engage with products and services. This has come about largely due to the rise of the cloud-based technologies consumers use, and only way for contact centers provide a great CX is by using the cloud as well.
As these preferences harden, it will be practically impossible for contact centers to be effective without using cloud technologies. In this context, the driver for IT to get off the fence with cloud has everything to do with being customer-centric, and nothing at all about what IT thinks is best for IT.
The same rationale holds for collaboration as well. In customer-centric companies, all workers – both inside and outside the contact center – have a role to play with CX. To deliver a great CX, agents must have real-time access to the right resources and expertise wherever they are in the organization. The more distributed your workforce, the more important cloud-based collaboration platforms become for supporting that.
Not only does this drive better agent engagement – for improving CX – but it drives better employee engagement for having the capabilities they need for all forms of communications and collaboration. If you agree with the thinking about how happy employees make for happy customers, the dots from CX to IT become easier to connect, and at that point, it’s hard to imagine a stronger rationale for getting on your path to the cloud.