While recent reports from various solution providers in the contact center market have highlighted the growing trend of organizations turning to the cloud as their next-generation platform for interacting with customers, a new survey by and the (CCNG) has revealed that this trend is really set to gain momentum.
As the headline above notes, the big news is that a survey of 197 contact center management professionals showed that while 77.5 percent of contact centers are on-premises today, 70 percent of respondents plan to move to the cloud. The survey also revealed that the top investment priorities for contact centers in 2014 include Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Workforce Management (WFM), and Business Intelligence (BI).
The reasons cited for moving to the cloud should be familiar to readers. Respondents cited greater scalability, a lower total cost of ownership, and the ability to more easily employ remote workers as the main reasons they were interested in cloud migrations.
“Through CCNG’s events, we have the unique opportunity to hear about the challenges and perspectives of contact center management across a wide variety of industries,” says David Hadobas, President and CEO of CCNG International Inc. “The conversations and discussions at those events reflect the findings of this survey in that there is a strong interest in leveraging cloud solutions to expand contact center capabilities in order to improve customer service and the overall customer experience.”
“The survey findings confirm what we hear on the ground every day—that cloud technologies are enabling call centers to transform the way organizations operate,” says Rich Fox, director of the contact center practice at Evolve IP. “Advanced technologies, such as integration with CRM and WFM, provide call centers with better insights and new options for implementing programs like Work From Home.”
Other survey findings included the following:
- Nearly 20 percent of the organizations surveyed did not have a disaster recovery (DR) plan in place.
- More than half of those surveyed were unable to ensure that their agents could continue working fully from home in the event of a power outage or disaster at their office.
- More than a quarter of those surveyed experienced no downtime in their call centers over the past 12 months, and another 24 percent experienced only one instance of downtime during that period.
- 61 percent of the call centers surveyed had agents working in more than one location, and 10 percent had representatives spread across more than 20 different locations.
The message from the survey is clear. If you currently operate an on-premises contact center and are in the process of evaluating whether, when, how, and why you should consider moving some or all of your contact center operations to the cloud, you are not alone. In fact, your colleagues recognize the operational efficiencies and the potential to improve the customer experience that such a move would bring. The trend seems to be the way to make the cloud your friend in a variety of ways.
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