5 Surprising Reasons Why you Need to Move your Contact Center to the Cloud (and 10 Unsurprising Reasons) Part 4

We’ve finally made it! Today, I am sharing our last three reasons you need to move to the cloud. Remember analysts estimate that only around 10% of contact center seats are now cloud based – however this is quickly escalating. If you aren’t already convinced it’s time to update your on-prem contact center solutions, these last three benefits of moving to the cloud should do the trick:
 

3. Global Voice
 

Contact center remains a voice-heavy investment. Most companies these days have customers all over the world. To properly service them, a company needs to provide local access numbers and ideally local voice handling for those customers. Voice is highly sensitive to network delays, and thus processing needs to be kept as close as possible to users. As a result, a really good contact center ideally has telco access, local numbers and voice points of presence (pops) all over the world. For an on-premises solution, this is often infeasible. Contact center is deployed in the headquarters or data centers, which are where the company is, not necessarily everywhere there customers are. Few companies can afford to deploy data centers all over the world just to handle the handful of customers they may have in those regions.
 

But - a cloud provider can do this. A good CCaaS provider will have many voice-based points of presence all over the world, with local access numbers and low latency audio. Though an expensive proposition, once done, the costs are amortized across all tenants, and the benefits accrue to all of them as well.

4.Cross Tenant AI Training
 

We’ve discussed AI in general as an obvious benefit of cloud. But there is another benefit which is less obvious – cross tenant AI training.
 

Ai systems require data – LOTS of data – which is used to train the software. In a single-tenant solution, the only data that is available is that of the single tenant. In a multi-tenant provider, there is the potential to use the data across multiple customers to do a much better job at training the software. For consumer applications, cross-tenant training – where each customer is a single user – is a given. This is the reason that the Internet giants, like Google and Facebook – have built such powerful AI systems. With enterprise, the benefits exist too, but care is needed.
 

Many enterprises do not desire to have their data pooled with other tenants, for fear that their information will ultimately benefit their competitors. As such, such sharing solutions generally require opt-in. Furthermore, they must provide a benefit – be it reduced costs, or better functionality, that comes from sharing data.

Over time, we believe customers will often opt-in because the benefits will outweigh the risks, and these benefits can only come to a multi-tenant cloud provider.

5. Comparative Analytics
 

The final surprising benefit of true cloud solutions, are comparative analytics. Today, enterprises have visibility to their own data, but they have no idea how their KPIs compare to those in their peer groups. In a true multi-tenant solution, the cloud provider can aggregate metrics together, preserving privacy, while providing great insight to their customers.
 

For example, consider a contact center that is seeing an ACW (after call work) time of 33 seconds. Should the contact center invest to bring this number down? Or is it pretty good for their business? With an on-premises or hosted solution, there is no way to know. A cloud provider has the data to compute the median ACW for contact centers of a similar size and similar industry. This aggregate can be provided to their customers. Continuing this example, if the contact center in question has 50 seats and is in the financial services industry, the cloud provider could provide them a chart which shows that other financial services companies with between 25 and 100 seats have a median ACW of 2 minutes. This is incredibly valuable information – it tells the contact center that they are already doing far better than the peer group in ACW, and perhaps this is not the right place for investment to further reduce it.
 

In conclusion, moving a contact center from the premise to the cloud has many benefits – five ones that are unsurprising and common to all cloud services, five that are unsurprising and benefit contact centers in particular, and five more that are surprising. Put together, these are fifteen reasons that explain why we’re seeing significant acceleration in the migration to the cloud. Companies staying on-premises are running he risk of being left behind.