)
“There is no business strategy without a cloud strategy.” Those words, shared by Milind Govekar, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, ring truer today than when he first said them three years ago. And it’s easy to see why. That was 2021, after all. Businesses—and consumers—were still reeling from the effects of the global pandemic. Companies were racing to digitize their customer experiences. Customers were frantically trying to assimilate to the new digital reality. New capabilities were being deployed and new expectations being formed. It was a pre-ChatGPT, pre-USB-C iPhone, pre-X (still Twitter) world—and it seems like ages ago.
Today, the digital transformation has given way to the AI transformation, and soon every company will be an AI company. A recent survey by Menlo Ventures predicts enterprise investment in AI to reach $70 billion in 2024, with $2.5 billion allotted for generative AI alone. However, those numbers are a drop in the bucket compared to another major investment: cloud migration. Menlo estimates that cloud software spend will reach a whopping $400 billion this year. The reason? Data. AI—particularly generative AI—needs massive amounts of AI-ready data to deliver meaningful results (and ROI). For most enterprises, that just isn’t feasible with on-premise resources alone. However, by migrating data to the cloud, enterprises can prepare themselves for making the shift to AI. It’s all about putting the horse before the cart.
More than 95% of new digital workloads will be cloud-based by 2025
That’s according to estimates by Gartner. The research and consulting leader also predicts that 85 percent of organizations will embrace a cloud-first principle by the same year. While those estimates apply to the entire enterprise, one of the main drivers behind the race to the cloud is enhancing customer service. Today’s consumers expect faster, smoother, more personalized customer service than they did three years ago—because they’ve already experienced it with the leading brands. If businesses hope to compete with industry leaders, they’ll need to get on equal footing. And that leap starts with—you guessed it—cloud migration.
4 reasons why enterprises need cloud-based customer service
Moving customer service—and specifically the contact center—to the cloud offers a wealth of benefits to businesses and their customers. There are financial reasons, of course: cloud-based customer service cuts operating costs and paves the way for new revenue streams. (More on that below.) It also enables businesses to keep pace—and even anticipate—customer expectations, giving those who embrace the cloud a considerable edge over their peers. Here are just a few of the reasons why enterprises should prioritize migrating their contact centers to the cloud now:
Cloud-based customer service costs less.
A lot less.
In a recent survey by McKinsey, more than half of technology and business leaders cited optimizing costs as the leading benefit of cloud computing. While some cost benefits may take longer than others to realize, the cloud-based contact center offers both immediate cost savings and long-term growth potential. Companies that adopt a contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) model can eliminate expensive hardware and server maintenance costs by leaving the heavy lifting to third-party vendors. They also eliminate the need to invest in in-house development as software updates are developed and deployed remotely.
Cloud-based solutions offer greater flexibility.
Along with cutting costs, migrating to a cloud-based contact center offers businesses greater operational and resource flexibility. Operationally, cloud-based solutions allow contact center staff to log in and access data from anywhere—a critical capability for remote workers or multinational service organizations. On the resource side, “pay-as-you-go” CCaaS solutions give businesses the flexibility to pay for only the cloud-based services they need. As a result, contact centers can choose where to focus their financial resources, adding or expanding capabilities as needed.
On the cloud, scalability is endless.
That’s not just hyperbole. It’s a fact. Cloud-based contact center solutions don’t have the same hardware or infrastructure limitations as on-premise models. That means businesses can quickly and easily scale up operations to meet spikes in traffic, new product launches or new CX deployments, like intelligent virtual assistants, that would otherwise take months of planning, preparation and development.
The AI transformation is happening on the cloud.
This is the big one: businesses will need to be on the cloud to reap the full benefits of AI. We already mentioned how the cloud has made AI-ready data more accessible to enterprises everywhere. As more organizations embrace the AI transformation, that accessibility will become increasingly vital for leveraging next-gen innovations, like generative AI. Only with cloud-based, AI-ready data will contact centers be able to use AI to its full potential, unlocking rich customer insights, driving better outcomes and efficiencies and optimizing customer service operations.
Ready to make the move to a cloud-based contact center?
Moving your contact center to the cloud may seem daunting at first. After all, there are a lot of considerations: time to value, data security and ease of accessibility, just to name a few. It’s equally important to remember that moving things to the cloud won’t automatically deliver customer experience or operational benefits right out of the gate. To be truly effective—and to maximize your ROI—your cloud migration must be part of a larger AI blueprint that not only prepares your data for AI usage but also prioritizes the use cases and applications that will have the biggest impact on your operations.
Partnering with AI-native solution provider like Uniphore can make the transition significantly easier. Our enterprise-class AI and data platform not only empowers organizations with the latest AI modalities—including generative, emotion, knowledge and conversational AI—it positions them to take full advantage of new and emerging innovations and capabilities. That’s because, with Uniphore, your data isn’t just available when you need it; it’s yours to use however you like. From AI-ready call and screen recording to advanced interaction analytics, our cloud-based overlay solutions give you total data sovereignty—no third-party gatekeeping, quality barriers or access charges—so you can leverage all your enterprise data across all your AI applications. And you can do so knowing your data is protected by the toughest data security protocols in the industry.
Want to see what an AI-ready cloud-based platform can do for your contact center? Contact us to learn more or schedule a product demo today!