Move Your Contact Center to the Cloud With the Right Solution and Partner

What is a cloud contact center?

A cloud contact center lets your agents engage with customers via voice, chat, messaging, and social media channels. It’s also referred to as Contact Center as-a-Service or CCaaS. Today, a cloud-based contact center like Vonage Contact Center can leverage advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and data capabilities to elevate each customer interaction, raising the bar on the experiences your team provides.

Define your strategic needs

Organizations may experience a common pitfall when evaluating cloud contact center options. Fascinated by the technological capabilities, decision-makers jump straight to choosing a solution without fully understanding their business needs.

You can avoid this problem by zeroing in on your organization’s strategic needs. Begin by considering these nine key questions:

1. How do we deliver value to our customers?

2. Can we use customer service as a competitive advantage?

3. What's important in our ability to succeed at customer acquisition, retention, and growth?

4. How can we move beyond functional silos with our customers?

5. How do we balance our "cost to serve" goals against our customer satisfaction goals?

6. What style of interaction represents our brand values?

7. What do we mean by multichannel strategy in today's market?

8. What is the future role of any existing on-premises applications versus cloud-based versions?

9. How does this solution need to integrate into the overall ecosystem that manages the customer lifecycle and internal business communications?

Of course, no two organizations are exactly alike. Not all of these questions may apply to your needs, so identify which questions are most relevant to your organization. Then, concentrate on answering those questions.

Finally, ask yourself, "Given each answer, what must the contact center solution be capable of delivering?" You should end up with a list of key capabilities, such as "proactive service," "personalization," "seamless customer experience," and so on.

Your task is complete once you’ve clearly outlined how a contact center solution must support strategic needs.

Define your operational needs

Next, carry out a similar process to identify your business’s operational needs and where a cloud-based contact center fits in. This will likely focus on factors like efficiency, effectiveness, and user experience.

Consider these questions to get started:

1. What levels of resourcing and site flexibility are needed?

2. What information do we need to drive strategic and operational decision-making?

3. What matters to customers and colleagues in terms of user experience?

4. How do we cater to our home workers (if applicable)?

5. What compliance needs to be baked into the solution?

6. How can we deliver an outside-in view of our performance?

7. What are our complete security requirements?

8. How will information move between on-premises and cloud applications?

9. What can be automated or provided via self-service?

As before, whittle down your list of questions to the ones most applicable to your situation, and fully answer each question. Share what you've learned from this process with potential cloud contact center vendors. This way, vendors can use that insight to prepare demos customized to your exact operational requirements.

Pro tip: If you're not sure how to define and communicate your operational needs, you might find it helpful to invest time in "day in the life" scenario planning for major contact center roles, such as agent, team leader, and site manager.

Prioritize your business needs

Now that you've defined your strategic and operational requirements, prioritize them. Some of your needs will be essential, while others will simply be nice to have. This exercise will allow you to focus on the right priorities when choosing a cloud contact center solution. It will also help you make sure that some of your non-essential needs are met later on.

The following priority matrix will help you assess the impact of a need on two things — first, on your customers and colleagues and, second, on organizational priorities. Plot the locations for all your strategic and operational needs. The needs that end up in the upper right-hand box with “high impact” will take top priority.

Once you've filled in your priority matrix, you can use it to screen potential solutions and assess vendors' responses. You should consult it once more while building your implementation plan. At that time, you can use the matrix to confirm that you are meeting the needs you originally identified as important.

Evaluate potential partners

Choosing the right partner is just as critical as choosing the right solution. Usually, if you buy a solution, you get the partner, too. But that’s not always the case. A glance at the market will tell you that you have several options to pick from. Generally, your choice of partner falls into one of two groups: premises-based vendors, which may have both on-site hosted and cloud offerings, or cloud-based vendors that only provide cloud solutions.

A good rule of thumb is to select a partner who has a strong, creative, forward-thinking vision, with enough stability to stay the course. Begin by drawing up your own partner criteria. Think broadly about what matters to your ongoing success and how you're going to assess that.

Here are a few key factors to consider:

• The vendor's vision for cloud-based innovation and the quality of its leadership team

• The cultural fit between the vendor's people and yours

• The financial stability of the company

• The quality of relationship that the vendor develops with its customers

• The vendor's attention to detail and commitment to being the best

• The level of passion for what they are doing

• The solution and its forward momentum as described in the road map

Pro tip: Once you know which vendors you want to evaluate, it's time to start getting to know them. Explore their online presence and even schedule meetings. As you do, keep notes and build a profile of each vendor candidate. For example, if your organization relies on Salesforce, it might be helpful to know that Vonage received the Salesforce Partner Innovation Award for 2023 and has been a Salesforce Premium ISV Partner since 2009. Recent offerings, like Vonage Premier for Service Cloud Voice, have given Vonage Service Cloud Voice customers even more choice with Salesforce.

Ask the right questions

A few well-timed questions can reveal whether a vendor would be the right partner for you. Here are some questions you might want to ask the vendor during the selection phase.

When talking with the vendor:

• Why are you our best choice?

• What extra value do you offer over your competition?

• What does your CEO believe makes your company special?

When talking with the vendor's references:

• How close was reality to what was promised?

• What are the best and worst parts about working with them?

• Which of the benefits that you've gained matter the most, and why?

Do your due diligence 

When it's time to choose a cloud contact center and partner, you need to be confident that you're making the right decision. Due diligence is the key to your success.

By taking the time to understand and prioritize your strategic and operational needs, you'll be better prepared to ask the right questions of potential partners and determine whether their solutions are a match for your requirements. The effort you put into this process now will pay off in improved customer service, operational efficiency, and competitive advantage down the road.

Explore the Ultimate Service Cloud Voice Buyer's Guide to learn more about your journey to cloud contact centers and how Vonage can help.