Partner Article

Contact centres on cloud 9

Today’s customers are technologically proficient and have higher expectation levels than before. The arrival of the web and mobile technology has had a profound and lasting impact on relations with customers. Today’s customers are increasingly impulsive, wanting the ability to be able to make contact at any time, quickly and have a wide range of contact methods. As a result, organisation have to be responsive, enabling multichannel, local, personalised exchanges to put the contact centre at the heart of the overall customer journey.

Technologies such as cloud-based contact centres are in many ways helping organisations meet these needs. Cloud computing is revolutionising the IT market and is enabling enterprises to adopt new business models which shift the focus from capital expenditure to operational expenditure. Different forms of cloud computing are being adopted including Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). Gartner recently confirmed the trend predicting growth of 20% per year in the global cloud computing market until 2015.

This ever-changing, dynamic nature of today’s environment is putting a lot of pressure on the ICT department and indeed the business. Traditionally, organisations have responded to both internal and external changes by upgrading their technology. Yet as technologies evolve at an increasingly rapid pace, the strain of these upgrades can increase the burden on an organisation’s balance sheet through increased capital expenditure, as well as the bottom line impact of specialised resources to run and maintain the systems.

The cloud model is helping reduce this burden as good cloud providers will be able to offer upgrades via the cloud on a modular basis, as and when organisations require it. For instance, if a retailer realises that the majority of its customers wish to connect via email as opposed to the phone, a cloud provider can enable this module as opposed to the ICT department purchasing and integrating the function.

Cloud-based contact centres are helping organisations map their resources against activity growth in real-time by virtually centralising resource allocation and reducing the cost of scaling up or down.

For instance, from a resource perspective, employees can work from home, using their internet connection to access a unique management interface or customer history. While some providers see cloud-based customer service centres as a silver bullet, other experts offer warnings of the risks of contact centres in the cloud.

To deliver the optimum customer experience, customer service must be reachable quickly via all communications avenues and in the customer’s preferred language. Contact centre staff should have the appropriate knowledge or language skills in order to provide customers with real help. A company operating its own customer service centre must size its infrastructure and manpower so that it is prepared for all eventualities. In principle, such scaling can be an expensive undertaking but through the nature of delivering cloud services the burden is reduced as the onus and investment is on the provider as opposed to the organisation.

Whilst cloud can deliver cost benefits, we are also increasingly seeing organisations leverage the cloud model to meet optimum customer experience. By having a centralised cloud infrastructure to connect an organisation’s contact centre network of resources, assets and people, organisations can route customer communications to the relevant expert quickly and efficiently. This translates into shorter customer waiting times and reduced customer service costs for the company.

There are a number of cloud service models open to organisations considering the technology. The cloud itself can exist either privately within the organisation, publically via a service provider or in a hybrid guise – a composition of at least one private and at least one public cloud to serve different areas of the business. There has been much debate as to which model is best suited to enterprises.

In our experience, the decision should be based on the ultimate objective of the contact centre, its service delivery model and whether the business can cost efficiently scale up or down when required.

In a private cloud environment, data, applications or hardware remain either at the customer sites or are transferred to an external datacentre. However access to the transferred application is limited to the employees of the respective company.

The public cloud equally offers a number of advantages such as a pay-as-you-go model to enable organisations scale accordingly as well as help organisations leverage global opportunities as applications and applications can be accessed anywhere. On the other hand, operating the application oneself in a private cloud requires in-house experts and more time until it is installed and ready, as compared to the on-demand solution in the public cloud, unless one has an external provider set up to manage the application in the private cloud.

In the medium-term we believe that it is likely that more demand will exist for private-cloud models in combination with managed services or for dedicated hosting, as opposed to purely public or private cloud solutions. In the managed-services model, the application is installed on site at the company but is operated, maintained and updated by an external service provider. In dedicated hosting, the application remains with the providers and can only be accessed by a company’s employees.

Today’s organisations still prefer physically owning their applications and data. The issue of data security has become a crucial part in the decision for or against a contact centre in the cloud. For example in most companies, customer data may not leave the premises due to data protection regulation and compliance measures. Should applications be deployed or used outside the company, it is critical to ensure that the external provider can implement technology that guarantees the desired level of security, availability and privacy via data encryption, backup, archiving, anti-malware, VPN and other security measures.

In many companies, call centres and customer service centres are located across the globe. Therefore, cloud computing providers operating globally and specialising as external service providers with a focus on multinational clients offer an advantage if they operate their own separate, secure data and voice infrastructure. Generally they also have the necessary pool of experts with the appropriate expertise, and can meet the high availability and security requirements for contact centres.

In the field of strategic IT investment, cloud-based solutions for contact centres are still on the outside looking in; there is increased sensitivity among customer service and IT managers with regards to clarifying this topic. It will be crucial to guarantee more rapid amortisation of investment costs also the security of customer data. This will then lead to a gradual spread of contact centres within the cloud. Whether a company’s best route is to pursue the private or public cloud variants, or a hybrid model of private cloud with managed or hosted services, depends on numerous factors including the circumstances, requirements, objectives - and should be analysed in detail case by case at the beginning of a call centre and/or contact centre project.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Gordon Loader, Contact Centre Practice Lead at Orange Business Services .