Integrating the cloud in your contact center
by Mike Sheridan, 10 May 2011.
When I first started in the contact center industry almost 15 years ago, I sold to telcos who fancied themselves as Application Service Providers for contact centers. Today, we would call it cloud. In fact, over the past two years, cloud computing has emerged as one of the hottest and most misunderstood offerings. Some things haven’t changed, though. As business leaders are struggling to figure out how to integrate the cloud into their contact center—and the enterprise as a whole—they should keep three things in mind:
The cloud isn’t a new concept
While the cloud has taken some business leaders by surprise, its development has actually been much more gradual. A clear definition of cloud computing can shed a little light on its lineage.
I define the cloud as any hosted service that users can access remotely. In the 1990s, for example, telcos began offering virtual private networks (VPNs) to allow individuals to log in to their accounts (think the early days of remote access for your company e-mail). Software as a service and information as a service are really just cloud products, although no one began calling them that until recently.
In fact, the origin of the term “cloud computing” reaches back to 1997, when
Ramnath Chellappa introduced the concept at a lecture at the University of Texas. However, as you can see by this
Google Trends search, it would be another decade before cloud computing really began to register in people’s consciousness.
So what changed? For one, Eric Schmidt of Google began talking about the cloud, while companies such as Amazon also began to recognize a huge market for the additional server capacity they had accumulated. By 2009, the cloud was beginning to permeate the conversations of every executive searching for ways to make their organization more nimble and cost effective.
And that’s the real benefit that cloud computing can bring—giving companies a way to pay only for what they use and avoid the significant capital expenditures of in-house servers and infrastructure. For small and midsize businesses, that means a smaller server footprint and lower costs for additional computing capacity, allowing business leaders to focus their resources on innovation and growth.
Organizational challenges to capturing the benefits of the cloud
Any transformational technology can’t achieve that potential without the proper organizational structure and processes. For instance, unified communications can facilitate collaboration in myriad ways while reducing costs significantly. But if a company has a culture that permits individual functions to operate as separate entities rather than as parts of a well-coordinated operation, all the communications tools in world won’t get people to adopt a cross-functional mind-set.
Similarly, cloud solutions can sometimes undermine collaboration among departments. Imagine a company that has made it a goal to integrate its sales, marketing, and contact center functions. Management has implemented a unified communications platform to encourage information sharing—for instance, so sales and marketing can benefit from the customer feedback and insight aggregated by the contact center.
However, if the sales team unilaterally purchases a Salesforce.com CRM application (a cloud offering), it could effectively put up a wall between itself and sales and the contact center. Why? Because depending on the systems involved, it can take months to years to integrate.
Organizational challenges to capturing the benefits of the cloud
That’s not to say that the cloud doesn’t have a place in the contact center. In fact, fluctuations in volume and demand present many companies a natural opportunity to integrate cloud computing.
The typical investment model for contact centers is to buy for the peak—that is, invest in enough capacity to accommodate periodic spikes. Many contact centers are seasonal, so they staff up for that period of time and then return to more normal levels for the rest of the year. The obvious downside of this approach is that companies have capital expenses that are being wasted the majority of the time.
That’s where the cloud comes in. By lining up additional capacity on a pay-as-you-go model, companies can significantly decrease their capital expenses. This can be especially useful for applications such as recording that use huge amounts of server and storage capacity.
Other factors should also be considered. Security, compliance, and continuity are all important variables that can significantly increase the organizational risk of the cloud. As the recent
Amazon EC2 failure demonstrated, for instance, the cloud is far from failsafe. Therefore, companies ultimately have to weigh the cost upside against the integration and security challenges and then make an informed decision.
While the cloud holds tremendous potential, executives need to avoid being taken in by the hype. By taking a more deliberate and strategic approach, executives can increase the flexibility of the contact center while reducing costs.
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