While recent reports from various solutions providers in the contact center market have pointed to the growing momentum of organizations looking to the cloud as their next generation means for interacting with customers, a new survey from and the (CCNG) has revealed that the trend is really going to pick up steam.
The big news as the headline above notes is that the of 197 contact center management professionals showed that while 77.5 percent of contact centers are premise-based today, 70 percent of respondents plan to move to the cloud. The survey also revealed that the top investment priorities for contact centers for 2014 include Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Work Force Management (WFM), and Business Intelligence (BI).
The reasons cited for moving to the cloud should be familiar to readers. Respondents believe the cloud offers them greater scalability, lower total cost of ownership and the ability to more easily employ work from home agents as the main reasons they were interested in cloud migrations.
“Through CCNG’s events we have the unique opportunity to listen to the issues and perspectives of contact center management across a wide variety of industries,” says David Hadobas, President and CEO of CCNG International Inc. “The conversations and dialogues at those events mirror the findings from this survey in that there is high interest in leveraging cloud solutions to expand contact center capabilities to improve customer service and the overall customer experience.”
“The findings of the survey confirm what we hear in the field daily – that cloud technologies are enabling call centers to change the way organizations work,” says Rich Fox, director of the contact center practice at Evolve IP. “Advanced technologies like integration with CRM and WFM provide call centers with better insight and new options for enabling programs like Work From Home.”
Other survey findings included the following:
- Nearly 20 percent of the organizations surveyed did not have a disaster recovery (DR) plan in place.
- More than half of those surveyed did not have the ability for their agents to be fully functional from home in the event of a power outage/disaster at their office.
- More than a quarter of those surveyed had no downtime in their call centers over the past 12 months, and another 24 percent only had one incident of downtime during that period.
- 61 percent of the call centers surveyed had agents working in more than one location, and 10 percent had representatives dispersed across more than 20 different locations.
The message from the survey is unmistakable. If you currently have a premises-based contact center and are in the process of evaluating if, when, how and why you should consider moving some or all of your contact center functionality to the cloud, you are not alone. In fact, your colleagues appreciate the operational efficiencies and ability to improve the customer experience to be gained from such a move. The trend seems to be the path to make the your friend in a host of ways.
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