5 Surprising Reasons Why you Need to Move your Contact Center to the Cloud (and 10 Unsurprising Reasons) Part 1

The contact center industry is at an inflection point right now in its transition from premise based to cloud based. Analysts estimate that around 10% of contact center seats are now cloud based, and it is accelerating. Cloud contact center has an estimated TAM of $24B, making it an incredibly attractive target for startups and incumbents alike. Technology shifts – around automation and artificial intelligence – are also creating a wave of innovation in contact center.

Yet – with only 10% of contact center agents in the cloud – it is clear that not everyone is yet sold on the cloud as the place to be for contact center. To help make the case, this 4 part series will outline five surprising reasons why you should move your contact center to the cloud, along with ten unsurprising reasons. Let’s start with the unsurprising ones, and begin with ones that are pretty much common to almost all cloud technologies.

1. Opex vs. Capex.

This is the one everyone understands. Premises based contact centers accrue a capital expenditure, whereas cloud provides an operational expenditure. This fits much better with how budgets work these days.

2. Scalability

Cloud solutions provide scalability. As a customer, you can start with a single seat, and then expand your usage over time. That expansion doesn’t require deploying new hardware or software, so its easy to go from 1 to 100 to 1000.

3. Simplicity

Cloud solutions are simpler. The cloud provider takes on the burden of operations – worrying about things like uptime, hardware costs, configuration, databases and backups. This simplifies what the customer needs to do – focusing just on configuration and usage.

4. Time to Deploy

Cloud solutions can be deployed much, much faster than premises based ones. This is because the cloud provider has already deployed the hardware, already set up the databases, already set up the network, and so on. When the customer requests service, it is merely a matter of provisioning the customer into the system. Contact centers in particularly are notoriously hard to deploy, with extremely long lead times on premises.

5. Innovation

With cloud solutions, you get the benefits of ongoing innovation from the cloud provider without lifting a finger. The cloud provider will upgrade their software regularly, delivering new benefits to their customers over time. With on-premises deployments, the customer has to purchase the upgrade and then deploy it in order to gain the benefit of new features. This historically was so burdensome and costly that customers would skip upgrades for years or more, sometimes even actively using products with versions that are no longer even supported by the vendor.

Next, I’ll be sharing the remaining five benefits of moving to the cloud that are a no-brainer. Check back in next Thursday for Part 2 of our Reasons to Move to the Cloud Series.

Join me on Wednesday, June 12^th at 11 a.m. PT for my ‘5 Surprising Reasons Why You Need to Move Your Contact Center to the Cloud’ webinar. Reserve your spot here.