Yesterday, I moderated anEnterprise Connect Webinar that featured Don Keane of Genesys and Sheila McGee-Smith, contact center analyst extraordinaire, discussing why cloud has become such a hot trend in the contact center. It's something most contact center vendors of any size are observing, and many of the reasons you hear are the usual arguments for cloud: Capex vs. opex (sometimes); flexibility in sizing; resiliency--many of which arguments for cloud in general are laid out very cogently in Dave Michels' recent post on hybrid cloud communications.
But a couple of new points came up that I thought were worth pointing out here. One thing that should be intuitive is something Sheila noted: Integration among cloud-based applications may well be easier than integrating with legacy CPE, because in many enterprises, that legacy CPE may be 20 years old, and integrating it with any other systems is going to be difficult.
Also, a particular advantage many enterprises are seeing for cloud contact center, according to Sheila, is in some of the more expensive applications that may be hard to justify as a CPE purchase. The example she gave is speech analytics--a costly purchase but a valuable capability to add to your contact center toolkit. With speech analytics, supervisors can be more efficient in their monitoring of agent conversations, using the analytics to home in on particular phrases that raise red flags. The alternative is for the agent to simply listen in to all calls in a set time period, and wait to see what comes up.
Making the investment in speech analytics as CPE might be a tall order, Sheila noted, but being able to purchase just this capability as a hosted service makes it a manageable expense.
Speech analytics leads to the broader issue of Big Data, which holds great potential for helping the contact center. Big Data can power better analytics for the contact center and fuel such cutting-edge trends as proactive customer engagement--and it's, almost inherently, a cloud-based function.
Another key point that came up is the cloud's ability to support a level of resiliency and redundancy for contact centers that medium- and even smaller enterprises probably can't afford to build themselves with CPE. If a business's contact center is its front door to the customer, cloud makes it economical for more enterprises to keep that door open. And using the cloud means you don't have to buy and build two identical infrastructures to get failover capability.
We had some great questions from the audience and terrific discussion between Sheila and Don. If contact centers are part of your areas of interest, I'd encourage you to check out the replay of this webinar.
Follow Eric Krapf and No Jitter on Twitter and Google+!
@nojitter@EricHKrapf
Eric Krapf on Google+
