Think Agile: Moving Your Contact Center to the Cloud

 

By now, we all know the benefits of migrating applications to the cloud: cost savings, faster deployments, scalability, flexibility and rapid access to channels and innovation. But what I’ve seen time and again is that the perceived pain of that migration is enough to stop organizations from trying.

Companies that decide to move forward and successfully made the transition opted for an agile approach that simplifies the trickier aspects of cloud adoption, reduces risks and delivers measurable results faster — giving those companies the confidence needed to get to the cloud.

During the Xperience 2022 session “Move to cloud with confidence,” Deanna Ruffat, Director of Professional Services at Genesys and I share more about this agile methodology. In this blog, I’ll dig a bit deeper into the process of moving your contact center to the cloud as well as a business case to facilitate the cloud migration.

Phase 1: Envision

Start by assessing your current environment and determining the factors that will govern the migration while you’re gathering requirements. You should also gain an understanding of what exceeding business outcomes and customer expectations looks like to your contact center.

Gathering these insights means holding workshops with key stakeholders in business, finance and operations to understand what’s working, current pain points, gaps between your current state and preferred future state, as well as security, privacy, integration and customization requirements.

Phase 2: Define

Develop a personalized and realistic migration plan that includes a timeline with milestones and related financial investments. The plan should also include specifics on making the cloud transformation process efficient — without upending your day-to-day operations. For example, think about simplifying processes with more automation and less hands-on time. You’ll provide more consistent experiences while reducing human error.

The Genesys Cloud Ignite™ tool cuts deployment time by automating time-intensive tasks, including rapidly creating and importing configuration settings and ingesting configuration data like queues, users and skills from on-premises solutions.

Phase 3: Clarify

Develop a migration plan that shows you can leverage the financial justification and benefits of cloud adoption to build a detailed business case for your transformation. Not only does a business case provide rationale for the preferred solution, but it dramatically increases the likelihood of the project’s success.

During the Xperience 2022 session, “Building a convincing business case for moving to cloud,” Marty Jackson, Director of Shared Services at Genesys and Giuliano Da Silva, Senior Director, Value Consulting, explained that a detailed business case can help in the following ways:

Managing the psychology of change: There’s often inertia working against you when you’re trying to do something completely different. It stems in part from concern about the potential missteps that can happen when making a big change. A business case provides insight that lets you understand exactly what you’re planning to do, why you’re doing it and how best to go about it. And that helps overcome the inertia that inhibits change.

Creating buy-in with stakeholders: From senior management to frontline users, people want to know “What’s in it for me?” when change happens. Developing a business case for moving your CX to the cloud shows those stakeholders the business value of the migration overall, as well as how it specifically relates to their roles (e.g., business, finance or operations). For example, the business plan can show how the cloud migration will reduce time to market, increase margins and revenue, or improve process efficiencies.

Eliminating migration risks: A business plan should detail exactly how you’ll migrate to cloud services, including timelines and milestones, associated costs, and specific plans for closing gaps between your current state and preferred future state. This information enables you to mitigate risk by seeing the full plan before a project kickoff.

Phase 4: Migrate

Once your personalized cloud migration plan is set, it’s time to execute it — within budget with minimal disruption and at a pace that makes sense for your business. A cloud migration journey might include a pilot site or a phased rollout by geography, based on your company’s specific needs and requirements.

Migrations also can vary in breadth and functionality; for instance, you might only want to move and optimize your existing contact center to the cloud. Or you might want to enhance your contact center with new customer channels, artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as context-based next-best actions, and performance metrics.

You might even want to use your contact center as a competitive differentiator — adding capabilities like AI-based predictive engagement and other data-driven insights to personalize every interaction, improve response times and outcomes, boost the customer experience, and enhance employee engagement.

Phase 5: Achieve

A successful migration positions you to take advantage of the agility and innovation of a cloud-based contact center — by optimizing solutions, transforming with digital or expanding with innovations.

“We can help you map your strategies and show you how [technology] can accelerate the realization of those outcomes,” said Ruffat.

With a personalized cloud migration plan that includes understanding your contact center business objectives and expected outcomes, such as decreased costs, increased revenue and customer loyalty, better customer experiences, and improved competitive performance, you can remove the hurdles that previously stopped you and move your contact center to the cloud.