More contact centers than ever before are transitioning data and systems to the cloud, and it’s easy to see why: It delivers the flexibility, efficiency and simplicity contact centers need to respond to lightning-fast market changes and increased customer demand. When implemented effectively, the cloud can help organizations unlock greater ROI by reducing IT costs and complexity, enabling better customer experience and scaling as business evolves.
But tapping into the full value of cloud applications can be a struggle for organizations: Across industries, challenges abound with change management, adoption, business process integration, optimization, data acquisition, application deployment, and more.
In the contact center environment, leaders are challenged to make the most of the cloud because they frequently don’t have a clear picture of how to lay the right foundation, cull targeted insights, drive ongoing value or increase maturity with cloud products already in use. Although the cloud enables high-impact capabilities like cross-application integration or customization to meet an organization’s unique needs, it’s often difficult to pinpoint a successful implementation strategy for these features in the real world. And day-to-day work can take priority over long-term initiatives, making it difficult to achieve desired ROI or impact customer experience.
But contact centers don’t have to leave value on the table in the move to the cloud. By focusing on a handful of key strategies, you can achieve maximum ROI. Consider these approaches as your contact center transitions to the cloud.
Enable a seamless transition: Start laying the foundation for success in the onboarding stage, before cloud implementation even begins. Begin by onboarding experts with business and technology expertise that can provide an outside perspective, eliminate blind spots and offer the latest insight into industry best practice. Then develop a change management plan that informs stakeholders across the contact center why the company is evolving, what’s changing and when changes are taking place.
Next, conduct operational assessments that dig into the current state of your contact center and take baseline KPI measurements. Doing so empowers your contact center with a picture of the “before” state, so you can properly calculate and control IT-related costs after implementation. Consider sunsetting legacy systems so users can’t slip into old habits, and focus transformation efforts on opportunities for quick wins and high business value activities as part of a roadmap for success, including a user adoption strategy to limit disruption. You’ll also want to identify partners who can provide support and check-ins during go-live and post go-live to ensure everything is working optimally. Additionally, you should conduct technical and adoption health checks to gauge where your contact center currently stands against its goals, where it needs to transform, and how to get there.
Drive whole-business transformation: Once your contact center has successfully moved data and systems to the cloud, it’s critical to ensure that operations run smoothly and that they are aligned to your goals for transformation. To do so, tap into experts who can ensure that best practices are used across all change initiatives and enable data-driven decision making. Implement performance benchmarking and ROI-capture analytics that point to areas where transformation is lagging and areas of additional opportunity.
Offer best-practice training sessions that draw on real-world customer scenarios, so your organization can efficiently leverage cloud platform features. At this stage, enabling data-driven insights around your organization’s KPIs can help identify transformation gaps to ensure that KPI goals are met while you reduce IT complexity and dependencies.
Ensure that you have capabilities and resources necessary for the cloud: Consider whether your organization has the expertise or resources internally to enable the desired ROI; outside support in the form of managed services can fill the gaps.
Look for partners that support cloud operations with services like proactive monitoring and risk identification, system administration, regression testing, status and trends reporting, and engineering support. Ideally you should identify partners that have technical and business expertise in the platform and solutions your contact center has chosen. Tapping this type of expertise can empower your organization with unrivaled insight into how to best optimize programs and integrations. In doing so, you can save substantial operational and downtime costs, and employees can focus on meeting day-to-day business needs.
Set your cloud up to deliver value for life: As the contact center environment continuously evolves, so too do the capabilities it needs from cloud platforms. Leverage advisory consulting, maturity models, value roadmaps, centers of excellence and hands-on training workshops that boost advanced feature adoption.
The cloud opens the door to new capabilities that improve metrics and empower better business outcomes, but success with the technology is about more than basic adoption – it’s about evolving how your contact center works and ensuring full utilization of technology. By implementing these strategies, your contact center can speed time-to-value, work smarter toward its transformation goals and increase the features, functionality and predictability of its cloud platforms.
NICE Value Realization Services (VRS) in the Cloud can help your organization fully integrate with NICE’s cloud platforms and realize true transformation. Its bespoke services pair contact center and technology experts with your organization to develop solutions based on your unique business environment. NICE VRS in the Cloud is now included in all NICE Cloud platform deployments to help contact centers effectively and efficiently navigate cloud transformation. Learn more about NICE VRS in the Cloud.