Many enterprises continue to rely on on-premises contact center technology stacks. Transitioning to a Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) suite undoubtedly offers greater opportunities for enhanced customer service capabilities. However, it is crucial to understand the practical implications and challenges that arise when transitioning from on-premises solutions to the cloud. The reality and ground experience can be quite different. Here are key factors to consider for a successful CCaaS migration:

1. Importance of Evaluating Real-World Usage

While impressive product demonstrations can be influential, the true value of CCaaS is realized when your agents actively use the platform on the ground. Conducting proof-of-concepts (POCs) and selecting the most suitable solution is vital for the success of your migration.

When evaluating a solution, always:

• Understand the overall architecture and evaluate if it matches your enterprise architecture vision.
• Align the roadmap with your organization’s customer service goals.
• Review the AI strategy of your provider to ensure it fits your plans and policies for using AI in CX improvement.
• Check if your provider offers a "try-and-buy" option, allowing you to experience firsthand the benefits and limitations of different CCaaS platforms for informed decision-making.

While these are critical aspects to consider, there are additional evaluation criteria and best practices to review. Servion can help craft an RFP after conducting discovery sessions and support the RFP process, including gap analysis and roadmap reviews, to aid in decision-making.

2. Evaluating Core Contact Center Functionality

CCaaS platforms offer a range of features and capabilities, but it is essential to scrutinize their core automatic call distributor (ACD) functionalities. Some organizations find that certain aspects of ACD in CCaaS solutions may not be as robust as their on-premises counterparts. While the functionality may be "good enough," it is crucial to compare it against your existing system to ensure it meets your specific needs.

Not everything with on-premises technology can be migrated on day one with an apple-to-apple comparison, and sometimes it is unnecessary when looking at your organization’s overall vision. Hence, building a migration strategy that best suits your organization’s goals is a critical first step.

3. Integration Considerations: Self-Services and CRM

Integrating self-service capabilities and CRM systems with CCaaS platforms is generally straightforward. However, if your organization relies on custom-built CRMs or other toolsets, careful enterprise architecture planning becomes vital before choosing and migrating to a specific CCaaS provider. Properly aligning your existing billing systems and their integrations with your future CCaaS solution will minimize disruption and optimize efficiency.

4. Understanding the Limitations of CCaaS

It is important to acknowledge that CCaaS may not provide all the features and functionalities of your legacy on-premises platform. Features like voicemail, call recording for internal agents, or comprehensive unified communications (UC) capabilities might not be readily available in native CCaaS solutions. In large enterprises, existing legacy CC solutions often coexist with UC solutions, requiring deep UC functionalities for contact center queues and routing.

Sometimes migrating directly to a CCaaS provider’s call recording and workforce management solution can lead to additional costs for managing legacy call recording solutions to maintain compliance due to interoperability limitations. Therefore, envisioning a roadmap for your overall UC and WFO strategy, and considering how CCaaS fits into your broader communication and employee management ecosystem, is crucial.

5. Preserving Years of Innovations

As a Contact Center Technology Administrator or a company striving for CX improvement, significant time and effort have been invested in innovating your existing contact center technology stack and associated ecosystem. Some innovations have proven successful for your organization and your end customers. However, not all aspects will be easily available or aligned with a CCaaS platform on day one. You might want to integrate some of your “best wins” into your CCaaS platform, such as:

• Screen pops to home-grown billing systems.
• Onboarding and offboarding agent integrations.
• Outbound lead generation, DNC sourcing, and scrubbing.
• Compliance and security controls applied enterprise-wide.
• IVR integration and lookup layers towards different back-office platforms.
• Self-service functionalities tightly integrated with your CRM and billing tools.

6. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Billing Routines

Implementing CCaaS often promises substantial upfront cost savings. However, it is important to assess the long-term expenses associated with the chosen solution. While the basic features of CCaaS may be competitively priced, additional functionalities can sometimes come at a premium. Properly baseline your feature requirements to accurately evaluate the TCO, considering both short-term gains and long-term sustainability.

Servion can help understand usage policies and caveats with each pricing model, ensuring that usage is monitored to avoid billing shocks. Having the right partner to assist with adopting features and day-to-day configurations is crucial. Remember, each feature can be easily enabled in the cloud but must follow best practices to ensure reasonable use is considered each month by the CCaaS provider.

Adopting a well-planned migration approach is essential to ensure the smooth transition of your innovations.

Overall, understanding the realities of CCaaS and architecting your solutions stack effectively is key to a stable and successful CCaaS migration. Cloud success is less about tools and more about strategy, particularly having a partner who ensures your cloud strategy drives business value. The right provider will act as a partner, supporting core aspects of your cloud journey, including customer journey design (automation, self-service), agent/employee experience (analytics, workforce engagement), operational intelligence (proactive engagement), contact center optimization (digital customer service), and productivity and cost.

Servion’s breadth of technology solutions, capabilities, and expertise uniquely positions us to handle any customer’s specific cloud needs. We help develop the right approach by ensuring clarity on the desired business outcome, utilizing our industry-leading talent to address core business issues along the way.

• Consultation-led vendor-agnostic approach focused on achieving business goals.
• Certification and expertise across a wide range of leading platforms (Cisco, Amazon Connect, NICE, Genesys, etc.) and applications (Verint, NICE, Calabrio, Google, etc.) enable us to plan, design, and support cloud solutions aligned with customers’ specific CX and business requirements.
• Large team of certified engineers spread globally.
• Proven cloud migration methodology and accelerators that minimize risk and ensure fast go-to-market.
• Industry-leading 24x7 managed services go far beyond traditional support.

Move to the cloud with confidence. Schedule a Meeting to continue the conversation with Servion’s team of cloud experts.