9 Big Reasons for Migrating Your Contact Center to the Cloud
Prashanth Kancherla
Jul 1, 2023
Rapid advancements in contact center technology are transforming how businesses orchestrate their customer experience. To keep up, companies — regardless of size — are increasingly shifting their contact centers from on-premise to cloud-based platforms.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Consultancy firm McKinsey estimates cloud adoption will unlock over USD 1 trillion in business value by 2030. As technology evolves and becomes more sophisticated, these figures will only grow, especially with the cloud facilitating the adoption of new-age technologies such as large language models, machine learning, generative AI, augmented reality, and blockchain.
Moreover, in a rapidly evolving business landscape, it is crucial for companies to meet the challenge of rising customer expectations. Contact centers are under pressure to optimize their efficiency and create an IT infrastructure that delivers a seamless customer experience, effectively and at scale.
Initially adopted by growing businesses and startups, the benefits and disruptive edge that cloud contact centers offer are now becoming clear to enterprises. In this article, we will explore these benefits and why your business must move from a traditional on-premise contact center.
Why Migrate? Cloud vs. On-premise Contact Centers
While cloud-based contact centers use software hosted in the cloud, on-premise contact centers require physical hardware present on-site.
Here are seven key differences between the two technologies:
| On-premise | Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Affordability | High upfront cost on license & hardware delivery, software installation & configuration | Low upfront costs Monthly operating cost |
| Ease of deployment | Requires hardware delivery & installation from scratch | Lightning-fast deployment with minimum complexity. Easy set up as the solution is pre-installed |
| Equipment Location | On-site | Cloud data center |
| Scalability | Requires hardware integration, is time-consuming & costly | Seamlessly scale the contact center’s functionalities as per demand |
| Flexibility | No scope for remote work, physical presence is non-negotiable | Agents can work from anywhere across the globe |
| Communication Channel | Inbound & Outbound calls | Omnichannel |
| IT Support | Business responsibility | Vendor responsibility |
| Integrations | Integration is complicated and requires IT teams to connect disparate applications manually | Seamless integration with CRM, ERP, and many applications through API |
9 Advantages of Moving Your Contact Center to the Cloud
Migrating to a cloud environment offers several advantages for organizations. This includes cutting costs, removing silos between systems and departments, and rapidly scaling up, downsizing, and adopting. As a result, you can personalize customer experiences, create omnichannel customer journeys, and access intelligent insights. Before planning a migration, you also need to prepare your on-premise to cloud migration checklist for your contact center. For an enterprise, there could be various reasons to move to the cloud such as staying agile, offering a superior customer experience, increasing efficiency, expecting high customer loyalty and improved lifetime value returns.
Let us discuss each advantage in detail.
1. Faster Adoption of Technology & Innovation
Today, innovation happens in the cloud. Without regular updates, legacy contact centers are being left behind. Not only do cloud services ensure access to the latest technologies and features, but the cloud also affords larger computing power necessary for advanced and emerging technologies, like machine computing and artificial intelligence.
Take for instance, how ChatGPT took the world by storm. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT hold a lot of promise for contact center performance but creating company-specific LLMs requires web-scale data which is unavailable to most businesses in-house. Yet businesses with cloud contact centers can seamlessly access these generative AI capabilities — just months after the ChatGPT release — with minimal IT infrastructure.
Moreover, machine learning technologies like natural language processing and predictive analytics need large amounts of processing power and storage room which are exorbitantly expensive, impractical, and out-of-reach for most on-premise contact centers. A cloud migration, however, allows companies to access this cutting-edge technology within tight budgets.
And accessing these capabilities is transformational for a contact center.
It affords them features like AI-powered chatbots, voice bots, neural search knowledge base, automated quality assurance and speech analytics, smarter, more robust dialers, and customized call-handling options.
These capabilities bring direct business, operational, and customer-related benefits including higher customer loyalty, lower churn, and higher customer lifetime value. Agents gain seamless access to customer information and smart service tools leading to faster response times, higher engagement, and more upsells. Supervisors gain an accurate, real-time analytical look at operations. And businesses gain deeper customer experience insights.
2. Agility, Flexibility, and Scalability
Deploying an on-premise contact center requires significant time, labor, and resources. Physical communications infrastructure, PBX lines, servers, hardware, and equipment must be installed, maintained, updated, and added while accommodating growth.
A contact center cloud migration is entirely different. The requisite infrastructure has already been installed in the server’s physical location. All that’s left is a virtual deployment, with timeframes varying from a few minutes to a few days based on customization requirements and other dependencies.
Cloud contact centers are built for speed and agility. This applies to the initial contact center migration and setup, along with the deployment of new services and features.
Businesses can add or reduce the number of agents within minutes. As demonstrated during the recent COVID pandemic, they can transform their entire contact center to work-home-home within an hour. Innovations, developments, and updates happen fast and frequently, without disrupting ongoing business.
3. End-to-end Flows with Seamless Integrations
Furthermore, cloud migration enables the contact center to integrate with other cloud-based applications. It creates seamless interoperability between disparate solutions which unifies data, extends service capabilities, and enables cross-functional workflow automation.
Legacy contact centers, by contrast, are often more difficult to integrate. Typically, this results in the voice function, or call center, being siloed — and hinders the collaboration required to resolve customer issues.
Deep CRM integration enables relevant teams to clearly track unresolved tickets and close these on time. It enables a business to build an end-to-end view of customers, presenting supervisors and agents with the complete history of a customer’s interactions with the company.
Agents have a single login and interface to work on as they resolve calls or chat messages, empowering them to maintain conversational continuity across voice and digital channels. As a result, contact centers can resolve queries faster and build more meaningful engagement.
Moreover, integrated contact centers enable businesses to plan omnichannel flows, adding voice, social media, or WhatsApp engagement at critical touchpoints in the customer journey. You can recognize callers in the queue and offer personalized call routing, self-service, and call prioritization.
4. Reduced Maintenance Costs
Legacy systems are extremely constrictive in terms of maintenance and development. They require costly hardware, deployment, & upgrades. An on-premise contact center requires on-premise maintenance and servicing.
Most solution providers require a contractual agreement for servicing and upgrades. These are typically quite expensive, with some providers charging an annual
According to a 2020 survey by Deloitte, around 50% of the IT departments’ budgets are spent on maintenance. A cloud contact center solution takes care of maintaining, servicing, and upgrading the infrastructure and applications for you and factors these expenses into the price.
5. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Businesses operating on-premise contact centers are extremely vulnerable to disruption. The entire center might have to be shut down during upgrading, repairs, or servicing. Small repairs may result in services being unavailable for hours or days at a time.
These systems are also vulnerable to data loss from breaks, poor repairs, or natural disasters. Municipal power outages and internet service issues can shut down operations during peak hours. Larger natural disasters can disrupt operations for extensive timeframes.
Maintaining in-house data centers, networks, and technology has been inherently risky. The cloud offers a way to lower risk by distributing the infrastructure over a large geographical area and building in other recovery mechanisms. Cloud contact center solutions will have several physical, networking, and solution redundancies that ensure continual service.
The cloud is built to maintain business continuity, prevent interruption, and facilitate disaster recovery with mechanisms like offsite data replication and alternative server sites. It ensures mission-critical resources are always available. They can offer advanced risk mitigation with telecom redundancy so that even if a telecom network fails, calls automatically patch to another network.
Plus, cloud migrations are smooth and can be carried out without interrupting work or creating lag.
6. Enhanced Security and Compliance
Running an on-premise contact center leaves businesses responsible for securing customer data and complying with global standards. That’s a big task these days.
GDPR, HIPAA, CPPA, CCPA, and CPRA are a few regulations to take note of. Your contact center must meet standards relevant to its operational areas and conduct ongoing compliance management activities (purging, anonymization, etc.).
Best practices have emerged in this area, such as ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO/IEC 27002. However, ensuring an on-premise contact center meets these standards is resource-intensive and requires dedicated work.
The cloud allows specialized solutions to offer a higher level of security to meet strict regulatory and legal compliance requirements while protecting contact center uptime and customer privacy. Partner with a solution that adheres to industry best practices and assumes data compliance responsibilities for you.
7. Cost Reduction, Control, and Management
A cloud contact center doesn’t entail the capital outlays of an on-premise contact center. An on-premise requires significant investments in equipment, networking technology, and infrastructure. Plus, on-premise centers have high overhead and running costs to maintain the equipment and buildings.
Cloud call center solutions operate virtually, with calls placed through VoIP technology. Businesses might want to invest in phones but can allow agents to use their own.
The cloud itself enables pay-as-you-use pricing rather than upfront costs. Cloud computing works by continually drawing from a pool of available resources. This on-demand computing power model is ideal for pay-as-you-use pricing.
A cloud call center can be run without any capital expenditure, and it enables more accurate and predictable budgeting, as pricing scales with growth and demand.
8. Advanced Analytics and Insights
Another advantage of cloud contact centers is that they provide managers with better reporting and analysis capabilities to monitor agent performance. A cloud contact center solution can provide deep monitoring, analytical, and management capabilities, offering continual real-time insight into contact center operations with precise control.
A McKinsey survey reveals that organizations leveraging customer insights outperform their peers by over 25% in gross margin and 85% in sales growth. So, it is important to increase visibility into the customer journey by collecting data and analytics across communication channels.
Innovations like Speech Analytics can potentially make every department within the organization more customer-centric by automating insights from conversations and leveraging them for strategic decision-making and tactical improvements. Unlike legacy solutions, the cloud enables 100% automated quality audits to help managers get a fair understanding of agent-customer interactions day in and day out.
9. Improved Remote Work Capabilities
Gartner estimates that there are roughly 17 million contact center agents worldwide in 2022. Remote work models have gained traction due to their low infrastructure costs and the ability to attract and retain talent.
With core services hosted remotely, cloud-based models provide flexibility to work remotely, scale operations & reduce infrastructure costs.
For many of our clients, running large-scale cloud contact centers via work-from-home operations led to cost-savings on infrastructure (office rentals and maintenance) and lower agent attrition — up to one-fourth lower than industry norms.
By utilizing the best talent across time zones, virtual work enables businesses to extend their reach and provide on-demand customer support 24/7. Cloud also improves collaboration between teams working remotely. Rather than working in silos, agents can access information easily from a centralized database where they can have a comprehensive view of the customer journey and provide timely responses.
Conclusion: Cloud is the Only Way Forward
Today contact centers are poised to evolve into dynamic, proactive engagement centers which are integral to a brand’s overall customer experience strategy. Rapid advancements in AI will further deepen this competitive edge.
By sticking to legacy solutions, IT heads limit their ability to innovate and miss opportunities to leverage disruptive technologies such as AI and machine learning. Technology is moving at an unprecedented pace, and those with on-premise infrastructure will find it impossible to keep up with the latest updates, both financially & operationally.
In short, cloud migration is mission-critical for businesses that want to stay competitive in the rapidly changing digital landscape.
Contact Center Migration to Cloud with Ozonetel
Some still expect lengthy annual commitments and force clients into inflexible pricing structures. Others tack on exorbitant fees for deployments, solution integration, and customer support. Many cloud solutions don’t fully utilize cloud capabilities, ending up with a platform that can’t be customized, can’t work with PBX infrastructure, and can’t scale without breaking. And good luck getting help when you need it!
Here is where Ozonetel differs. Ozonetel is an agile, scalable, user-friendly, and cost-effective cloud contact center solution that also provides unparalleled customer service. With our solution, you will have the following advantages:
Robust
Supporting 200,000+ users to manage thousands of calls daily, our robust platform enables companies to take complete control of their customer communication. Businesses that could not handle their high and fluctuating call volumes have invariably turned to our cloud contact center solution.
- For instance, a leading stockbroking company handles 40,000+ calls daily and 1000+ calls concurrently on our platform, ensuring high uptimes even during peak loads.
- A rapidly growing online business scaled its contact center from 8 agents to 700 agents on our platform, where today they efficiently handle 30,000 calls daily.
- India’s leading private sector bank migrated 15,000+ agents from a legacy solution to our cloud platform.
24/7 Support: Our service is personal and always available. We offer 24/7 service, 365 days a year, with a dedicated account manager assigned to every client. A single point of contact will walk you through the buying process, deployment, and onboarding, and then continue as your account manager.
We are an industry-leading CX platform consistently winning G2 trust badges based on our user experiences. In the recently-concluded spring review, G2 has named Ozonetel a contact center software leader & awarded us 23 badges for fastest implementation, high performer (enterprise), ease of use, and easiest admin, among other categories.
Easy to deploy: Our contact center migrations and deployments happen fast. Think hours, days, or weeks, not months. That also applies to cloud migrations from legacy PBX technology. Ozonetel offers pure, hybrid, and private cloud options and can customize a solution that works best for your enterprise.
During the pandemic, we deployed enterprise-grade COVID helplines for healthcare organizations within days. We have also rapidly migrated thousands of agents to the cloud while ensuring high uptimes and service levels.
Efficient remote work model: Migrating contact centers into the cloud will enable greater agility with work-from-anywhere capabilities and call center intelligence. With Ozonetel, you can switch to remote working in minutes. They can use landlines or mobile phones as well. Our POPs in all continents ensure jitter-free voice calls across the globe.
Customize & Streamline Workflows: Contact centers need APIs to ensure smooth sales or customer service operations. With a robust open API Platform, there is no fence holding the data collected inside the software. You can easily integrate your system with any other business tool to put in place efficient workflows & enable custom routing.
Data rich: With our technology, you will have the clearest opportunity to capture data. You can leverage live and historical monitoring of over 400 parameters for effective monitoring, control, and insights. Using advanced analytics and automation, you can deliver a personalized, proactive, and productive customer experience
Omnichannel & AI capabilities: Optimize contact center performance by leveraging omnichannel capabilities and unifying customer interactions across voice and digital channels. Tap into our AI capabilities to improve interactions and provide proactive support .at every stage of the customer journey. Ozonetel is now using large language models such as ChatGPT to bring in more efficiency to contact centers and enhance the customer experience. Let’s take a look at our major innovations:
Automated quality audits: Eliminate random sampling and manual errors & evaluate agent performance in real-time and derive detailed insights on conversational intent and customer sentiment
Conversational Intelligence: Assist agents in navigating complex issues with real-time insights built from millions of interactions and full visibility of customer journey.
Voice Bots & Chatbots: Automate repetitive tasks and common queries at scale. Gain a competitive advantage with bots powered by ChatGPT.
Intelligent Neural Search: Equip agents with precise and contextual information retrieved from an ever-evolving centralized knowledge repository.
By creating a cloud migration strategy tailored to your customer experience (CX) needs, you can achieve seamless digital transformation & run your contact center efficiently at an optimized cost. Ozonetel provides modern cloud solutions that can greatly simplify these tasks. Let’s make that happen. Try Ozonetel now. We can create a contact center migration plan that gets your center into the cloud swiftly and securely.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Assessment: Evaluate your current contact center infrastructure, applications, and requirements. Building a business case to assess potential benefits & identify dependencies
- Prepare: Plan a pilot migration test to assess the feasibility, performance, and potential challenges of moving to the cloud before fully committing to the migration. Assure compliance and establish Key Performance Indicators
- Design: Define cloud requirements tailored to your organization’s needs, plan resources for a seamless transition, and perform data backups to safeguard critical information.
- Deploy: Migrate data and applications from on-premise infrastructure to the cloud environment. Validate and document the successful migration, capturing key details such as the migrated data, configuration settings, and leveraging automation for DevOps practices.
- Optimize: Closely monitor the new environment, proactively identify issues or areas of improvement in terms of performance, security, and overall operations. Provide comprehensive training to agents on using cloud-based infrastructure and applications.
Call center migration to the cloud can be described as the transition of a call center from an on-premise set up to a cloud-based environment. The process involves moving the entire infrastructure including telephony, IVR (Interactive Voice Response), ACD (Automatic Call Distribution), and workforce management from a traditional legacy solution to a cloud platform. With cloud migration, businesses can improve scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency, delivering a superior customer experience.
Ozonetel’s AI-powered, full-stack platform has enabled over 2,500+ businesses to get on the cloud, automate processes, and reduce operating costs. Ozonetel is an industry leader within the Customer Experience (CX) space, offering businesses a robust, omnichannel customer communication platform to manage end-to-end communication flows. Cloud migration is easy and seamless with Ozonetel. We offer:
Fast Deployment: Deploy a cloud contact center within 24 hours. Migrate legacy systems in days, not months.
Easy to Scale: Ozonetel’s proprietary, open API cloud-native platform is flexible, robust, and caters to businesses of all sizes.
Simple & intuitive: Spend less time training staff. Our interface is easy-to-use, adaptive, and customizable.
Off-the-shelf AI Capabilities: Automate conversations, call quality audits, and CX insights with Conversational AI & Speech Analytics.
