Why should I switch to the cloud?
My server room is my comfort zone
You’re a contact centre manager. You have a contact centre platform installed in your server room. It is sized in terms of licences and hardware to handle peak volumes. You have had perpetual licenses for the past 5 years. Your annual maintenance payments amount to less than 10% of the perpetual licenses.
So why should you switch to the cloud?
This will require a new platform, configuring call flows again, training agents.
Why go through all this trouble?
What is the cloud?
Your on-premises system is installed in your server room. The cooling system is maintained by your building’s facilities management team. Your contact centre platform sits on an operating system on the server.
It is connected to the agents’ computers and phones through the office network. The computers and the phones have separate cables. Each computer has a client installed to communicate with the platform.
A cloud system is installed in datacentres belonging to providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS). Hardware, operating systems and networks is their problem, not yours. Once the initial configuration is done, your agents just need to log in and go!
What’s so good about the cloud?
Finance: You’ve paid for your perpetual license and you’re paying your maintenance. Your platform provider will send you an end-of-life announcement sooner or later. Then, you’ve got to look for a new solution anyway. On-prem solutions are sized to handle the highest expected call volumes, even if these volumes are reached for only 2 hours a day. You are paying for redundant capacity. You are also paying to run and maintain the hardware, including power and cooling. Cloud solutions are built to flex and scale as volumes increase and decrease. You normally pay for cloud services on a consumption basis. You only pay for what you use.
Flexibility: Amazon Connect and Omningage provide an omnichannel solution with built in call recording. AWS has other services that can easily be integrated to give additional functionality, such as speech analytics, bots, reporting etc. All of these are also priced on a consumption basis, so pilot projects become affordable and the risks of trying products out become manageable.
Security: Many IT managers feel nervous about “their” data being stored in an AWS data centre. None of them have a problem with keeping their money in a bank! AWS runs a massive global network of data centres. Their backup and business continuity options include high availability in data centres which are hundreds of kilometres apart. Their security budgets are high enough to design and build the latest and most effective AI based monitoring technology operated by the most talented security professionals in the world. The US Department of Defense even runs Top Secret workloads on the AWS cloud. How comfortable would you feel hosting nuclear missile launch codes in your data centre?
It’s green! The sheer size of the cloud providers’ data centres provides massive economies of scale in terms of how efficiently they can use cooling. The cloud companies design and build their own custom servers that use less power and generate less heat, so having a reduced impact on the environment. The cloud providers are also working to power their data centres partly or completely with renewable energy, reducing both their electricity bills and their carbon footprint.
Next steps:
If you’d like to find out more about what’s in the cloud for you, contact your AWS partner or your local Omningage Sales Director. We’ll be delighted to talk to you.
OMNINGAGE is a cloud based Contact Centre Platform powered by Amazon Connect and AWS.
OMNINGAGE Connect is a next generation cloud based user desktop built for Amazon Connect which offers effortless user experience, promotes agent engagement and boosts staff productivity.
For additional information on Omningage view their Company Profile
