One of the most far-reaching impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic for global businesses has been the accelerated pace of digital transformation.
For years, company boards have acknowledged the importance of digital transformation in delivering business continuity and resilience, but related projects remained on the back burner. The pandemic forced a change; 2020 saw companies accelerate their digital transformation to ensure teams could quickly pivot to working remotely without affecting business-as-usual operations.
This shift in attitude saw projects originally expected to be completed over months instead implemented in weeks. At the same time, businesses turned to the cloud to support internal communications and collaboration in the new normal, as well as external-facing conversations with contact centers routing customer calls directly to agents working in home offices.
Migrating telecom infrastructure into the cloud is an essential step to enabling seamless customer and colleague engagement while companies pursue their digitalization agendas. By placing key infrastructure in a virtual environment, businesses can enhance the communications experience, while achieving quick time to market with scalability, security, and reliability.
Virtual numbers play a vital role in digitalizing unified communications and contact center solutions, enabling customers to interact easily with service agents. Cloud communications can also greatly reduce the costs associated with entering new regions and accessing new market opportunities, allowing telecom infrastructure to be set up without the hassle of establishing costly physical infrastructure and acquiring licenses.
Looking at the Bigger Picture
It’s no secret that companies that have already embraced cloud-based communications stand to reap rewards from accelerated digital transformation strategies. Speed of implementation and delivery have been key driving factors during the pandemic, and will remain so for the months and maybe even years ahead. But companies need to think bigger, more global, and long term to ensure their cloud communications implementations are able to evolve with organizational needs, and to avoid the need to rip and replace systems a few years down the line.
When looking for a cloud communications partner, companies must ensure the chosen supplier can live up to the challenge.
So, what should they be looking out for?
Key Assessment Criteria
Assessing potential cloud communications providers on seven key criteria will help to ensure the partner selected can support a business’s global expansion plans. Ask the following questions:
Does the provider:
- Offer programmable technology such as local calling, globally? This guarantees that companies are just a local call away from the consumer in any global market.
- Provide direct connectivity to all major cloud platforms? The partner you choose must be able to support connectivity to your cloud platform — and be able to migrate to a new platform with the organization if needed — whether that’s AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or any others.
- Include calling encryption as part of the service? Encryption and security of the network that underpins the connectivity ensure that data and users are protected and reinforces the organization’s ability to handle sensitive user information.
- Provide multichannel support? Messaging support is especially key for companies that rely on SMS to deliver customer alerts, reminders, and marketing promotions.
- Deliver global capacity and service scalability? Scalability is one of the core advantages of cloud. The solution should have the ability to scale easily — whether that’s adding more lines to one market or moving to new markets in line with business growth.
- Offer the ability to handle traffic spikes at peak times? This means no call or message goes unanswered.
- Incorporate a consultative approach as part of the offering? A business’s cloud communications provider should be an extension of the team — a partner — and should have the knowledge and expertise to deliver a robust cloud communications strategy.
Conclusion
Now is the time for digitalization and cloudification. But businesses must have the systems and tools in place to ensure employees can do their jobs effectively and that customers’ needs are met. And with its experience, expertise, and partner relationships, BICS offers what it takes to provide a seamless cloud migration experience globally and support digital transformation at scale.
To learn more about how BICS is supporting businesses with their digitalization and cloudification efforts, read the white paper,
here.