With costs soaring many companies are trying to decide if on-demand cloud services for their contact center are right for them. New vendor entrants with multiple-channel support options have spurred interest in cloud solutions for customer support. Early adopters for cloud services were smaller companies who found cloud solutions an affordable alternative compared to premise-based solutions. However, larger companies with the need to effectively engage customers across multiple channels, including social and mobile applications have become more interested in cloud services. The increased complexity for managing customers who no longer view the telephone as their prime channel and want consistent services across all channels is driving this change. With an aging infrastructure and the need to support a more complex contact center environment companies find that cloud based services offer immediate benefits, such as faster time to deploy, increased flexibility and scalability and access to more advanced applications.
Companies must also factor in how changes in the management of their contact center infrastructure will affect service and support. Some companies move cautiously into cloud services for customer support by selecting a few applications, such as voice portals or e-services, while retaining other applications on premise. But new bundled cloud service offering offer a compelling alternative and deliver a broad portfolio of services including multiple channel routing, workforce optimization applications security and network optimization that deliver comprehensive contact center solutions.
Moving to the cloud will not always be less costly, as there are many considerations based on the services offered and a company’s internal support infrastructure. When considering a cloud provider, it is important that a company realizes the importance of setting expectations on the service delivery and understand all costs. Choosing a service partner for contact centers means fully evaluating their offering and ability to deliver high reliable services. Key areas to include in your service provider selection criteria include:
- Service level agreements (SLA). These spell out requirements and penalties for non-performance in areas such as response times for major and minor service issues. SLAs indicate expectations for reporting and monitoring, problem escalation process, and quality assurance measures.
- Reliability. The reliability of the network is essential for managing customer support expectations and system availability needs to be at 5 9’s. Also, assess the provider’s policy in providing system updates and determine all charges for making changes to current configuration. Include disaster recovery and back up plans in this discussion.
- Security. High security and ability to comply with external regulations are essential. Security measures include encryption, access control and identity management.
Consider your service provider as a business partner and focus on their ability to work with your organization for a more successful outcome.
