3 Things WFO Solution Providers Can Do to Ease Your CCaaS Migration

Moving from on-prem to a contact center as a service deployment model can be a heavy lift, but your  WFO provider can help. 

The momentum toward deploying workforce optimization (WFO) solutions in the cloud is undeniable. Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) will one day be the standard, but we’re not there yet, so choosing to migrate to a cloud software infrastructure can be complex.

That said, you’ve done your due diligence and made your decision; you’re moving your on-prem contact center to the cloud. You likely know by now that it’s not a ‘lift and shift’ exercise; you’ll need to be able to count on your WFO provider.

It’s easy for CCaaS migrations to veer off course, and an awareness of potential pitfalls – awareness borne of experience - is key to avoiding or mitigating many of the common mistakes made in cloud contact center migrations. The right WFO provider can be an essential consultant during the process, steering you away from potholes on the road to CCaaS in three fundamental ways:

1. Goal Setting

In partnership with your provider, you should develop a clearly defined list of business goals to drive your migration strategy. Your WFO provider should be able to offer valuable input and use cases to facilitate goal-setting. As with any project, your cloud contact center migration goals need to be realistic, measurable and attainable.

"The clearer your goals, the less chance of scope creep, extended

deployment times, escalating costs and frustrated employees."

The clearer your goals, the less chance of scope creep, extended deployment times, escalating costs and frustrated employees. Playing the consultant role, your WFO provider should be able to assess your contact center’s strengths and weaknesses as a first step. After an assessment, you may find that not every tool or process lends itself to the cloud. A WFM migration could be prohibitively complex or costly, for example. The risk of essential data loss if you migrate your Analytics tool might be too great. The risk of compromising your contact center’s quality management capabilities could be too acute.  

Every system and every organization is different, so the answers to those questions will vary, but a close examination of your particular WFO solution suite and your contact center’s unique character prior to a cloud migration will inform the goals you set for moving to a cloud environment. Your provider can help you attain those goals by breaking them down tactically.

2. Gaining employee buy-in

It is a must-have for any successful migration. Any reluctance of the people directly impacted by the CCaaS migration will only further escalate costs, extend adoption, and increase organizational disruption. Assuming your WFO solution is intuitive and easy to use/maintain/manage to begin with (certainly not always the case), your provider must be prepared to provide training that reduce any short-term pain associated with the migration that employees might experience. They must also demonstrate how their cloud contact center solution will eventually make employees’ jobs easier and make them more effective.

Generally, it makes little difference to the user experience whether a WFO solution resides on-premise or in the cloud. But, some organizations see a move to the cloud as an opportunity to set new expectations for some employees. As an example, often, one of the major objectives associated with cloud migration is to extend a contact center’s omnichannel capabilities; agents may need to learn new skills, like gaining proficiency in voice and chat channels. 

There are reasons employees resist cloud migrations. As an educator, your WFO provider can help you develop strategies for reducing resistance, smoothing the road to adoption by helping you train your front-line users. 

3. Defining migration success 

After you’ve gone through the CCaaS migration process, how will you measure its impact on your contact center’s operational efficiency? On the customer experience and their satisfaction? On the agent experience? What constitutes success?

It’s important to remember that when you’re migrating your contact center to the cloud, you're investing less in the cloud than you are in a WFO solution that deploys in the cloud. With that perspective, your focus will be where it should be – on the WFO solution’s performance. 

Your contact center has been monitoring performance in areas, like CSAT, NPS, Average Hold Time, First Call Resolution, etc., on your legacy on-premise solution. The good news is that CCaaS platforms should make monitoring and collecting performance data easier. 

You’ll be collecting the same data with your CCaaS system. Still, if you've used your cloud migration as an opportunity to move to another WFO solution, you’ll be using these metrics to measure the effectiveness of a new system. Organizations operating in highly regulated industries, such as healthcare, financial services, government and education, carry an additional compliance burden. CCaaS providers must explain how they address compliance with regulatory frameworks like HIPAA, PCI DSS, and MiFID. 

In short, your CCaaS provider should never use the fact that you’re migrating to the cloud to overshadow their solution’s capabilities. Nothing should distract you from monitoring their solution’s impact on your operation.
 

"It’s important to remember that when you’re migrating your contact center to the cloud, you’re investing less in the cloud than you are in a WFO solution that deploys in the cloud."

More operational transparency; more data; more insights into the customer experience and agent effectiveness; rapid, easy, inexpensive scalability; increased operational agility; reduced infrastructure costs; financial flexibility – the list of CCaaS is long and well documented.

According to Aberdeen Strategy and Research, though, 36% of contact centers currently use any form of cloud technology. That compares to approximately 44% of traditional small businesses, 66% of small tech companies, and 74% of enterprises.
You could label our industry a laggard or say we're deliberate. I prefer the latter. Regardless of the substantial and accelerating movement toward cloud technology, most industries are still in the middle of a learning curve. In the contact center space, we know there’s no shame in asking questions and nothing presumptuous about expecting our cloud-enabled WFO providers to have the answers.

CCaaS providers should be prepared to play several roles during a cloud migration – partner, consultant, trainer, and educator. As you consider competing providers, ask questions about each role. Choosing the right WFO provider for you is as much about understanding their process for taking you to the cloud as it is about understanding the features and capabilities of their solution.