Use case series: Preparing for the unexpected by migrating to the cloud
For those in charge of contact centre technology, the speed at which it, and the ways in which we use it, changes so rapidly that it’s easy to fall behind. Ultimately, this can negatively impact your customer experience, expose you to compliance risks and become costlier to manage, among other things.
If you’re operating your contact centre on outdated technology you’re definitely not alone. Ecosystm data commissioned by SecureCo in 2021 found 46% of organisations were considering migration to a cloud solution - meaning many hadn’t yet started making the shift.
Yet this isn’t a big surprise. Traditionally, migrating contact centre technology to the cloud hasn’t been easy. Particularly when many traditional carriers don’t allow you to re-route existing numbers individually, meaning additional numbers need to be provisioned and routing rules set up that can be complex and costly - let alone the impact on the operations of the organisation.
LocalSsearch, an Aussie digital marketing firm was in that same boat. Localsearch’s CTO realised its outdated voice system had become an inhibitor to delivering high-quality customer experiences for its 26,000+ customers and that it needed to move to the cloud. The team was worried this could lead to unhappy customers and ultimately impact results. What it didn’t realise at the time was that the impending COVID-19 lockdowns would result in a distributed remote workforce and an almost tripling of call rates to its contact centres.
After landing on Genysys Cloud to power its new contact centre platform, Localsearch knew it needed to upgrade its full telephony infrastructure to enterprise-level SIP. However, it wanted to avoid the costly and time-consuming need to install new hardware or have any manual network changes that could cause downtime. For example, some types of numbers can only be ‘migrated’ during office hours, causing major disruptions to the customer experience. Avoiding this would also help convince internal stakeholders that the investment wasn’t going to backfire.
That’s where SecureCo’s Enterprise Voice solution came in. Localsearch chose SecureCo’s Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC) enterprise voice solution, allowing them to connect via cloud exchange and manage the infrastructure externally. Given the urgent need to keep its disparate workforce connected and to manage the inundation of calls, SecureCo was able to deliver a project that could usually take up to 6 months, in just two weeks.
In the unprecedented months following the project, Localsearch’s team handled thousands of customer interactions, without a single dropped call. It was able to onboard 60 additional agents in just two weeks, all of whom were remote workers, and had a 100% reduction in outages.
Localsearch’s story can be applied to a number of scenarios whereby a contact centre needs to scale up and down its calling capacity. From retailers during peak sales periods to insurance companies after a natural disaster, SecureCo’s enterprise voice solutions ensure customer service agents can rely on seamless enterprise-grade technology whilst having the option to scale up and down instantly as needed.
In a tough economy, providing poor customer experiences is not going to cut it - don’t let traditional carrier limitations hinder your migration plans. SecureCo’s enterprise voice services allow you to migrate and configure individual numbers or bulk number ranges with zero impact on your customer or employee experience. The self-serve portal for number management makes ordering porting and provisioning numbers faster, and more scalable. And you can even enable tier 1 multi-carrier diversity for better resilience and call quality.
Whilst it’s impossible to know what hurdles will be faced by contact centres in the future, what we do know is that moving your contact centre and unified communications technologies to the cloud is the only way to be prepared for the unexpected - whether that be another dramatic shift in the way we work, an economic downturn or shifting demands from customers. Moving to the cloud gives contact centres the flexibility and control to support them in times of growth and austerity.