It’s cloudy today, where’s the sunshine?

From a market perspective, Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service, North America” report predicts that “by 2022, contact center as a service will be the preferred adoption model in 50% of contact centers, up from approximately 10% in 2019.” Additionally, the report predicts that speech interfaces will initiate 70% of self-service customer interactions by 2023, an increase from 40% today.

Clearly the demand for cloud-based contact centers is in rapid growth. Companies are moving several applications (phone systems, contact center, web/audio/video conferencing, email, CRM, IVR, and many more) to the “cloud”. Does that mean you need to consider moving your premise-based investment to the cloud? “Consider” is the key word, yes you should be evaluating the pros and cons.

The primary reason companies are moving to the “cloud” is because they want to get out of the business of being the provider to themselves. Another words, they have limited IT resources or prefer their IT staff to be focused on strategic business priorities. Companies often use these cloud services as a utility model. Pay per user per month per application. But what is cloud?

Cloud-based contact centers are a network-based service in which a provider owns and operates contact center technology. Thereby providing its services remotely to businesses in a subscription model. There are 3 types of clouds. Public clouds, private clouds and hybrid options. If you evaluate vendors that only offer public clouds, they will obviously show you the benefits of a public cloud. Private cloud providers normally offer all 3 types. As you “consider” moving to a “cloud”, you need to understand which cloud type will meet your business requirements.

A private cloud is also referred to as a hosted service. The provider or reseller host the service in their data center or in your data center. A private cloud offers several benefits that center around performance, reliability, security, dedicated service (platform and private network connections) and comprehensive customization. However, a private cloud often is more expensive both on the initial implementation and ongoing subscription costs. Larger enterprise organizations prefer a private cloud solution based upon business continuity and single tenant advantage.

Public cloud offerings are growing in popularity. Public cloud providers host the service in their data center, deployed in a multi-tenant offering over the internet. Public clouds normally have lower implementation and ongoing subscriptions costs. Small to mid-size contact centers often prefer a public cloud based upon reduction in costs and speed of deployment.

Hybrid offerings are very common. Premise based contact centers currently represent almost 85% of contact center deployments. Some industries (financial/banking, government, healthcare) face uncertain regulatory issues that prelude cloud consideration. With existing premise investments and regulatory uncertainty, hybrid solutions offer the best of both worlds. Hybrid allows a customer to maintain their existing premise-based contact center investment while adding new cloud applications such as workforce optimization, speech analytics, voice biometrics and others without forklifting their core solution.

As you can understand, there is not a one size fits all solution. The best solution is what is best for your business. If you need help finding the sunshine within the clouds, input LLC has a wealth of experience with all clouds and the investment tools to help you evaluate the overall business value.

Rick Sexton
Business Impact Specialist