The COVID-19 pandemic challenged enterprise organizations to reimagine how they manage operations and deliver customer service. As companies shifted from an on-site operation to a distributed work model, organizations that had not already migrated to the cloud were forced to accelerate their transition. This proved especially true for customer support departments and call center teams that were still tethered to legacy and on-premise technologies.
In fact, recent studies reveal that approximately 70% of today’s customer service centers have plans to move to the cloud within the next 12 to 24 months. Why?
Simply put — on-premise contact centers often lack the flexibility and scalability to cost-effectively adapt to changing environments quickly.
Not convinced?
Here are six reasons why migrating from an on-premise to a cloud contact center solution is essential to an organization’s digital transformation strategy and ability to operate in the future of work:
1. Cloud Contact Centers Have A Faster Deployment
The implementation of an on-premise contact center often takes between 6 to 12 or more months to complete. By comparison, cloud contact center deployments are generally completed in weeks. No hardware – just software.
Of course, migrating from an existing on-premise installation to a cloud-based operation can pose its fair share of challenges, depending on the complexity of the existing solution.
However, some solutions provide Hybrid Cloud deployment options to help bridge the gap between systems to quickly enable cloud benefits without ripping and replacing what might already exist. This cloud migration strategy allows enterprise call centers to seamlessly enjoy the best of both worlds while inherently adopting a long-term on-premise to cloud migration plan for their call center.
2. Cloud Services Can Offer a Lower Cost and Higher ROI
As opposed to on-premise systems, cloud call center solutions require minimal upfront costs and capital expenditures. They also often have no costly annual support or maintenance fees, as the SaaS model typically includes regular upgrades and service-level agreements.
Over the course of three to five years, cloud contact center solutions can match the total net cost (capital and operating combined) of an on-premise deployment. However, this comparison often overlooks the added ROI that cloud solutions offer with the continuous delivery of new features and capabilities such as IVR conversation designer, speech analytics, and advanced reporting.
On-premise call center systems, in contrast, usually remain technologically stagnant during the term of the contracted services unless costly upgrades are made. Plus, on-premise solutions carry the added expense of maintaining internal (or sometimes outsourced) staff to manage the on-premise environment and the inherent risk should one of those key resources choose to leave the organization.
3. Contact Centers Have More Infrastructure Flexibility
According to one study, the 2020 shift to remote work caught 72% of businesses technologically unprepared, with the majority dependent on in-office business models. As a result, many organizations lacked the flexibility to quickly enable work-from-home agents at a time when call centers were needed most.
Unlike cloud solutions, on-premise contact centers lack the ability to seamlessly enable work-from-anywhere agents due to the dependency on physical desk phones, virtual private networks (VPNs), hardware proximity limitations, etc. They also lack the ability to easily and cost-effectively scale operations up or down as a situation or need might dictate.
By comparison, cloud call center solutions simplify access to on-demand resources, allowing for faster response times without limiting the technological capabilities.
4. Cloud Call Centers Can Scale Up To Support Global Enterprises
As organizations grow, the capital expenditures and requirements to expand their on-premise capabilities do as well – in many ways amplifying the size of the effort required to maintain such environments. In contrast, cloud environments often maintain a global footprint with multi-tenant installations scattered globally. These contact centers are then limited only by the reach of their cloud providers, such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google.
The use of such cloud networks can also inherently provide added security and internationally recognized compliance benefits (GDPR, SOC2, HIPAA, PCI) which can otherwise be costly to privately attain and maintain with on-premise solutions.
5. Cloud-Based Solutions Can Integrate With CRMs To Offer Omnichannel Experience
Unlike on-premise solutions, cloud-based contact centers are often designed to integrate and leverage data from CRMs and other systems of record, to enhance customer service and bring together the inherent benefits of both offerings.
That’s a good thing considering 72% of executives listed poorly designed omnichannel experiences and unintelligent routing among the top four reasons that keep them up at night. In fact, more than 50% of people cite poor customer service as a reason to stop doing business with a brand.
Removing the traditional communication silos associated with on-premise solutions can quickly improve customer interactions and optimize agent efficiency. It’s also oftentimes much easier to connect one cloud solution to another than it is to connect on-premise technology to cloud solutions. Consider low-code/no-code solutions, for example, which are a far cry from complex and customized in-house builds which take time to create and even more effort to keep operational.
6. Comprehensive Reporting and Analytics Can Be Leveraged To Improve Customer Experience
In the Cisco Contact Center Global Survey 2020 report, 90% of surveyed executives consider customer journey data analytics an important function of any call center. However, 74% of those executives cite analysis of data among the top 5 challenges they face with call centers today.
Cloud-based contact center solutions, unlike their on-premise counterparts, offer a wealth of cost-effective, flexible, and modern real-time and historical metrics, such as Speech Analytics, IVR Analytics, and actionable supervisor wallboards. More importantly, data-sharing between platforms and ease of permission-based access helps to overcome traditionally siloed databases to offer a more complete picture of the health of the operations.
On-Premise vs Cloud Contact Center – A Clear Winner
The adoption of cloud contact centers has become a necessary step for enterprise companies to remain competitive and meet evolving business demands.
Is your business interested in dialing up its digital transformation and migrating to the cloud? Discover 3CLogic’s deployment options.
