Contact center technology is as critical to the success of an organization as any other business application.  But, like most business applications, there are a variety of vendors and approaches to take – and businesses need to make sure they choose a solution that fits their needs. That means matching current operational needs and technical requirements with the right feature sets and peripheral applications, but also with an eye towards the future as business needs evolve.

Contact center applications have often been deployed in on-premises data centers to retain high levels of control, customization capability, and security. This model makes IT teams responsible for  ensuring the infrastructure — server boxes, space, cooling, computing power, storage capacity and more  — is prepared to support the demands of the contact center solution. It also requires server and software configuration to make sure resources are available across the business as different applications are deployed and updated and integrated with other systems and applications. It’s a lot more complex that it initially seems, especially when it comes to upgrades and maintenance.

Consider a banking customer who calls a branch office to initiate a fund transfer.  The system needs to go through multiple layers of authentications and confirmations before the transaction is completed.  It starts with authenticating the customer with a CRM look-up, then validating a qualified and permissioned support agent to process the transaction.  The system must then verify available accounts and balances before logging the transaction amount, time and date, and whether it’s a one-time or recurring transaction.  Finally, all these lead to a confirmation record and then delivery of that confirmation to the customer.

This end-to-end transaction requires orchestrating many different systems that must share information to support the functionality and processes, data, and volume.  Between the system and database interdependencies, servers needed to handle the processing loads, and related maintenance and management — this can quickly turn into an overwhelming task for IT teams.

Any number of issues could take the contact center offline: a server overload, a failed patch, a software upgrade breaking a connection that then requires additional upgrades, and more. With so many interconnected components, if one fails, the customer’s experience is anything but easy.  The costs and time needed for coding, testing, updating, and customization – not to mention support from external vendors – becomes prohibitive, regardless of the size of the business.

It doesn’t have to be that way.  Neither contact centers nor the customers they support have to suffer due to the complexities of managing solutions.  Increasingly, businesses are moving their contact center technology to the cloud to simplify IT demands while increasing business agility and flexibility.

This benefits small-to-medium businesses who don’t have large IT resources to dedicate to the contact center, in particular.  Modern cloud contact center solutions deliver all the built-in functionality needed for agents, supervisors and administrators, and  advanced functionality through open APIs that enable data access between dependent applications.

The Genesys PureCloud solution was built to embrace that choice.  It takes an API-first design methodology and provides built-in extensions with many applications in a browsable app marketplace.  Public APIs are available for even greater customization for businesses that need it.  A GUI-based system process automation tool combines the various connection points within a business and allows users to easily define the data needed for each transaction type – the APIs do the rest.

The PureCloud software also functions as  a full-blown, pre-built contact center application that’s intuitive and feature-rich across multiple channels.  PureCloud offers advanced analytics to effectively manage the entire contact center across channels and locations.

Modern cloud solutions offer an effective transition strategy from legacy to cloud contact centers that helps reduce costs, provide better customer experiences, and increase business efficiency.  PureCloud also future-proofs the contact center by being deployed in AWS and always making the latest version of the contact center application available, eliminating the burden of upgrades for IT staff.  It’s really a win-win-win for everyone from the contact center teams to IT to the customers they all support and helps drive their success.

To learn how you can drive your contact center to new heights leveraging the cloud, listen to the archived webinar, A Plan to Measure Your Call Center Success in 2019.  We’ll discuss why thinking outside of the traditional server box is the right model and how you can leverage it to get the most out your customer engagements.