At the end of March, Calabrio, a customer experience intelligence company, released insights around strategic trends and opportunities for contact centers in 2021, shedding light on the evolving landscape of contact center trends. These findings underscore the ongoing patterns that have emerged as a result of the pandemic-induced changes.
Covid-19 accelerated the digital transformation across all organizations. Contact centers were suddenly forced to become agile in the operations and required maximum flexibility in their technical infrastructure.
The 2021 report found these changes so impactful that more than three in four contact centers made full or partial moves to the cloud and 68% of these happened during the pandemic, illustrating the need for organizations to become knowledgeable of the capabilities of the cloud. 2020’s report showed that just one in ten contact centers had fully migrated to the cloud, while 2021’s report increased to four in ten.
“In response to the pandemic, brands resorted to defensive strategies to survive. The migration to the cloud was a product of those strategies. However, now that contact centers have evolved and the industry looks to the future, companies are realizing they have a new weapon at their disposal. With cloud solutions integrated into their contact centers, brands can be more proactive, strategic and offensive-minded in 2021. While the migration to the cloud was meant to keep brands’ floors intact, cloud-based solutions will now allow them to push their ceilings higher than they imagined,” said Tom Goodmanson, president and CEO of Calabrio.
Furthermore, Evan Kirstel, B2B Technology thought leader stated, “A cloud platform is the most obvious choice in almost any circumstance. It provides higher security, improves efficiency, allows for faster business process optimization and supports digital transformation initiatives.”
Here are a few take-a-ways I related to in the contact center integration niche as we move towards a post-pandemic (exciting 😊) world
1. Cloud powered agility helps contact centers match rising customer expectations
In 2020 90% of contact centers stated they were investing in adding channels and technology to meet rising expectations and 2021 showed this played out as most contact centers (either fully or partially in the cloud, and on-premise) did invest to meet rising expectations.
Cloud maturity was directly related to success in implementing channels, business intelligence solutions, analytics and more. Contact centers with full cloud solutions were nearly twice as likely to successfully implement these additions over on-premise or partially in the cloud solutions. In fact, two out of three on-premise contact centers still felt limited by their current contact center solutions.
Even half of partial cloud contact centers report that their technology is a barrier. Most full cloud contact centers aren’t worried that their infrastructure will be a limiting factor in their ability to exceed changing customers expectations. In addition, cloud contact centers are more likely to add additional channels like social, chat, etc.. DaVinci customers are illustrating this by adding pre-built integration applications to connect with best-of-breed vendors and even building their own to handle unique use cases.
2. Cloud security fears are decreasing
Most contact centers have become less fearful of cloud security over the last 5 years, in fact three out of four contact centers say data security is no longer a barrier to cloud migration. Contact centers are recognizing the cloud is almost always more secure. With security technology and threats growing more sophisticated it is becoming more difficult and costly for organizations to build and manage in-house. Plus, contact centers benefit because many of the “as a service” (iPaaS, SaaS, etc.) vendors deliver security services as part of the as a service.
As the only Interaction Orchestration Platform for contact centers, DaVinci meets and exceeds modern security standards. In fact, we’ve spent a significant amount of resources over the past 2 years increasing and highlighting our security. Hear from one of our security leaders on our approach in this blog here.
3. There is still fear in data loss while migrating to different applications.
Often organizations aren’t comfortable with the process of migration or the resources available to handle the migration. In fact, contact centers are two times more worried about data loss in migration than data loss in the cloud. This is where best-in-class vendors educate how they combine technology and best practices to ensure smooth experience with pre-built integration applications to drive assured integrations.
DaVinci negates this fear by allowing organizations to migrate at the speed they are comfortable with and by allowing them to continue to pull information from multiple sources as needed. For example, if the contact center is moving from a home-grown solution to Salesforce, administrators can configure DaVinci Workspace to pull from both applications.
DaVinci also provides an extensive library of pre-built integration applications to a variety of leading CRM and communication channels, making migration an easier process. Visit our App Gallery to view them all.
4. Data suggests many cloud contact centers believe they’ve achieved their full potential
In reality, there are significant unrealized opportunities in the cloud for AI, Machine Learning- Driven Analytics, Cloud Powered Workspace Environment Management and future-proof agile strategies. Even simply investing in an integration platform for your contact center will not only improve your customer experience by having the ability to create more personalized workflows and interactions, but future-proof it by allowing you to connect to whatever applications you need tomorrow, next month or next year.
Seeing is believing in the cloud trend suggests the slowly moving contact centers may struggle to accelerate until they at least take small steps in migrating workflows to the cloud.
