5 Things You Should Know Before Moving Your Contact Center to the Cloud

More and more of the modern world is running on cloud based technology. Compared to on-premise applications, the cloud offers many benefits, including state of the art infrastructure, lower capital expenses, automatic updates and the ability to scale to meet demand.

Business leaders are becoming very aware of these advantages, yet when it comes to contact center operations many organizations still operate in on-premise systems. Even if the rest of the business' applications have moved to the cloud, the contact center is one of the last applications to be modernized. In the webinar Five9 held with Eventus, 51% of participants were working with on-premise contact center operations but were ready to learn more about why they should adopt a cloud approach.

In addition to having a customer-centric approach to our cloud-based solution, at Five9 we have a dedicated focus on empowering the agents who work so hard to ensure customer satisfaction. By using integrations with other cloud-based technology, agents have access to more relevant customer information at a moment's notice, can quickly make decisions and drive resolutions, and are enabled to be proactive in how they interact with customers who need service. In fact, once a contact center switches to the cloud, businesses are often surprised to see a rise in agent productivity.

As you prepare your business case for migrating your contact center to the cloud, here are the top five items you should be sure to address.

Program management: Make sure there is a clear owner of the program. Keep your stakeholders in mind because they are the ones who will be affected by the move to the cloud and they all have different expectations of how the cloud will affect them.

Change management: Understand the new tools and have a clear communications process. Although cloud updates and new releases are taking place, you need to have a process around regression testing and release management. Understanding how to correctly implement new features and take advantage of them is critical.

Infrastructure readiness: Identify who is in charge of scaling your contact center operations from an execution perspective. Realize that there is one physical system, but multiple virtual systems that need attention.

Autonomous operating units: Realize that when you are working with multiple vendors, you will have to pay attention to how the environments operate and are managed.

Ongoing support: Understand how your licensing works and all of the services that are available to you.

The benefits of using a cloud contact center far outweigh any obstacle or learning curve. Companies will see increased agent productivity, have the ability to scale for business growth, provide improved call quality and solve service issues quickly. Five9 was born in the cloud, and we are built to empower businesses with our robust customer journey analytics, rich customer context, easy connection to other systems, quick agent resolution and multichannel capabilities. The cloud is here to stay and by adopting cloud-based tools across your entire organization you will develop better relationships with customers and ultimately increase your bottom line.