7 Make-or-Break Factors To Consider Before You Migrate Your Call Center To The Cloud

Are call centers on the cloud a nice-to-have infrastructure for the customer experience function?

No, it has become a must-have infrastructure faster than we could predict. The COVID-19 pandemic drove this transformation faster.

85% of businesses today identify as hybrid or multi-cloud, and by 2025, more than 95% of new digital workloads will be cloud native.

Where do call centers figure in this transition?

73% of call centers report increased uptime, and 43% expense savings after moving to the cloud. When you get these kinds of advantages, naturally, you will be inclined to move to the cloud.

Before you think of moving to the cloud, let us spend some time understanding why businesses are moving to the cloud and what you should be wary of while planning the cloud migration.

Why are businesses migrating to the cloud?

Let us look at some of the key reasons for this migration.

On-demand flexibility

What are the common scenarios you encounter where you may have to scale your infrastructure?

• You are planning a flash sale or a new campaign, and you expect your call volumes to go up.
• The holiday season is approaching, and you plan to run offers that would make your call volumes go up.
• There is an outage in your service, and the call volumes unexpectedly go up.

How do you handle this?

With a cloud-based call center software, you can scale up and down your dial capacity at the click of a button. There aren’t any forklift upgrades, just plain scaling.

Lower costs

With cloud, you don’t pay for unutilized infrastructure or licenses. You only pay for what you use. You can slash your operational expenses by up to 35% with the cloud infrastructure, while boosting CSAT and loyalty.

Remote-first support

During the on-premise days, the only way you could connect to your call center infrastructure was to do it by physically being present at the office. The other option was to use VPN licenses, which came at a hefty price, and the bandwidth requirement was fairly large. This worked well between offices, but it could hardly support the functioning of your remote agents.

With cloud, you don’t have to worry about being present in the office or connecting using VPNs. All you need is a working Internet connection and access to a browser to access your cloud call center. It supports the truly remote and hybrid work needs of businesses.

Continuous innovation

Were you doing your upgrades over the weekends? 

You can safely forget such upgrade headaches with a cloud call center.

Your provider rolls out new features like a smarter IVR system that understands natural language, instant sentiment scoring to flag disappointed callers, AI-driven call routing that sends customers to the best available agent, and live dashboards that update in real time.

All of these upgrades will happen behind the scenes periodically. You simply log in to discover powerful new tools, without any downtime or manual installs.

Global reach

You are available 24/7 for your customers. It doesn’t matter whether you are in London or Singapore, your multi-region cloud call center will place data and agents closer to the customers.

There won’t be any latency or issues with the call quality.

Enterprise-grade security and compliance

Most cloud call centers carry SOC2, ISO 27001, and PCI-DSS certifications. Besides, they offer end-to-end encryption, and even let you choose data-residency zones for GDPR, HIPAA, and other local regulator compliance.

7 make-or-break factors before you migrate

Now that we have understood why we should migrate to the cloud, bear in mind that it isn’t a casual endeavor.

You need to rethink how you operate. To start, ensure that you get these seven factors right in your cloud journey.

#1 Integration and Open APIs

• Do you get plug-n-play integrations for Salesforce, Zoho, Zendesk, Freshdesk, LeadSquared, Dynamics, or your ticketing system?
• Will your platform push real-time call, agent status, and customer interaction events into your BI and analytics tools?

#2 Security and Compliance

• Does your provider offer SOC2, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA certifications?
• Does it support TLS 1.2+ encryption in transit, and AES-256 at rest, with customer-managed key options?
• Can you choose your data residency options across geographies to satisfy GDPR and other local regulations?

#3 Scalability and SLAs

• Does the system spin up new servers automatically when calls spike 200 to 300%?
• Are there points of presence in your key markets to ensure call quality?
• Does it support 99.9% uptime with concrete service credits for downtime?
• Does it offer dashboards that show latency, packet loss, and historical uptime?

#4 Disaster recovery and resilience

• Does your provider offer automatic failover when your data center goes offline?
• Does it offer a recovery time objective of under 5 minutes and a recovery point objective of zero data loss?

#5 Innovation roadmap

• Does your provider give you a clear roadmap of the new features? Can you plan your launches around the latest features?
• Do they take you as part of their beta program? Do they provide early access to new modules?
• How does their update happen? Do they talk about outages during upgrades, or do they happen behind the scenes?
• Does your provider keep you updated on the sunset features?

#6 Total cost of ownership & ROI

• Are you paying per user, per minute, or per API call? Does your provider offer you the flexibility to choose?
• What are the add-on fees for speech analytics, sentiment modules, and premium support?
• How does your provider charge you for recording and storage beyond retention windows?
• How does your cloud pricing look in comparison to your on-premise models?

#7 Change management and training

• Do your agents get safe spaces where they can click around without affecting live calls?
• Does your provider offer tailored sessions for power users, supervisors, and frontline agents?
• Does your provider lead support clinics during your go-live?
• Does your provider have knowledge bases, FAQs, and self-service videos?

You must nail these seven pillars to reap all the agility, cost savings, and innovation that cloud call centers promise. Even if you miss one of these seven pillars, you are as good as trading one set of headaches for another.

This is how you must go about your cloud migration.

Identify what’s holding you back today.

Benchmark vendors by scoring them on these seven must-have criteria

Pilot the migration in a low-risk environment.

Your customers already expect instant and effortless support. It’s time to rise to the challenge.