If you’re motivated, you can switch any piece of call center software to the cloud. There are plenty of good reasons to – but it can be intimidating to make that commitment. Ultimately, most businesses will jump at the chance to make their service better and cheaper. When it goes well, it’s a rare win-win! But – there are always risks involved… but we’re going to look at how you can minimize them.
In this post:
- Why do businesses move call center software to the cloud?
- Will you be able to guarantee SLA uptime?
- Can you maintain a good standard of audio?
- Will you lose control of internal processes?
- What about call en process flows?
Contact centers have a lot of component parts, and pretty much all of them can move to the cloud. Some businesses take a piecemeal approach, moving one piece of software – like their ACD systems – at a time.
That’s probably the safest approach, and the simplest to manage. But hypothetically, is it possible to move every system to the cloud at once?
In practice, it’s not as challenging as you might assume. It’s like giving your car a tune-up. Once you’re changing the oil, you might as well check the brake fluid too…
Why do businesses move call center software to the cloud?
It’s easy to make a case for the cloud. Call centers that migrate can usually provide a more versatile customer experience while lowering their costs. They will generally have flexibility in their choice of providers and features too.
But there are a few things that contact center leaders lose sleepover.
- Will we be able to guarantee our uptime SLA?
- Can we maintain our quality standards for audio?
- Will we lose control of processes?
Let’s have a go at answering these.
Will we be able to guarantee our uptime SLA?
‘Uptime’ is the amount of time your systems are working and you’re able to provide services. (That’s opposed to downtime when systems aren’t connected.)
It’s impossible to guarantee 100% uptime. So how close can you get?
When call centers talk about uptime, they focus on ‘counting 9s’. For example, two 9s means 99% uptime. 99% would be a disaster!
On the other hand, five 9s – 99.999% – would be hugely impressive.
Can it really make that much difference?
Yep! Look at it like this – if a 24-hour contact center has 99% uptime, they’re unavailable for 7.3 hours every month. Big problem.
Meanwhile, the same contact center – now with 99.999% uptime – is unavailable for just 26 seconds.
In the real world, the doable SLA for most large call centers is four 9s and better. But is that something you can get from cloud-based software? Or only from traditional, on-premise solutions?
You might be surprised to learn that the tide has turned on this question. Cloud-based call center software now offers more reliability than on-premise rivals.
In fact, about three-quarters of call centers say that better uptime is what most encouraged them to switch.
Can we maintain our quality standards for audio?
Your call center can really only be as good as its audio. So can you keep it top-notch?
You can indeed – but there are a lot of factors to balance, like an app and media channel hosting, and getting reliable hardware. So whenever you’re considering a telecoms provider, they’ll need to be able to explain how the quality control each part.
It’s also worth asking how many carriers they use. This makes a substantial difference to quality and uptime.
The flexibility of the call handling platform also matters. Will you be able to change processes – without coding –and optimize traffic for voice?
A lot of platforms want to lock you in with proprietary telecoms, IVR, ACD, and the rest. That makes you totally dependent on them – a situation that most businesses will want to avoid.
The call platform should have enough flexibility to handle complex network and infrastructure needs while also fitting into your current IT environment.
That is a vital part of getting high-quality audio. If you can’t choose which elements to use, you will be limited in how much you can optimize.
Will we lose control of processes?
Control is important. And yet, it’s often the first thing call centers give up.
Maintaining control depends on having a strong integration strategy. You might choose a pre-packaged SaaS platform. As soon as you do, you’ve lost control over call processes, because you can only work with the tools they want to provide.
SaaS providers might disagree, and point to public APIs which can open up customization. The problem is, that customization takes a lot of development time.
Do you have a big team of developers with time on their hands?
One of the great things about cloud-based call center software is the flexibility. Don’t like a product? Drop it, and move on.
But if you get locked into one vendor – like a SaaS platform – your decision-making power is gone.
Don’t forget – sooner or later you’ll need to update your call and process flows.
The stuff we’ve already talked about – uptime, quality, reliability – they all matter. They’re the basics.
But maybe you want to use the cloud to really future-proof your call center?
In that case, you need a way to ensure that you’ll always be able to edit and improve your call center processes.
We’ve talked about how public APIs allow for customization, but only with expensive development time. That’s why No-Code platforms are increasingly popular with call center leaders with one eye on the future.
No-Code platforms are exactly what they sound like – a way to build and evolve systems without writing any code. They use pre-made components that users can simply clip together as needed.
With a top-line No-Code platform, a single person can create automated processes in days which would normally take weeks or months.
These processes generally focus on automated data entry, intelligent call routing, dynamic outbound dialing, and more.
The pressures facing businesses continue to change and diversify in unexpected ways. Customer expectations are higher than ever and customer service operations often struggle to keep up.
Moving call center software into the cloud is the first step; continually improving your services, without coding, is the next step.
About babelforce
babelforce is a global cloud communications platform focused on No-Code integration and automation. The platform allows non-technical people to build even the most complex of integrated processes for customer-facing teams, particularly in the contact center.
