Okay, you’re in the Cloud. Now what?

Using the cloud to power your CX is just the beginning of the story. The rest is written by you and your team.

This series of blogs about cloud contact centre migration has so far covered the research (Inform) and development (Transform) stages of the process. Today, I’ll be focusing on the final and arguably and longest and most important stage – Perform, which is the ongoing refinement of your cloud contact centre.
It’s important to remember that a cloud contact centre is never complete. Nor should it be. The beauty of the cloud is that it’s flexible. So, when customer behaviour changes or new regulations are implemented, your contact centre can adapt.
Ultimately, the goal of the Perform stage is to constantly shift your customer experience in an ever more positive direction, reducing the likelihood that you’ll ever have to go through another labour intensive transformation project ever again. Perform should be viewed as the new normal for your business.

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The Three Pillars of Success

While the idea of having to shift your business practices may be daunting, it really needn’t be. The ongoing success of your cloud contact centre can be boiled down to three fundamental principles: monitoring data, understanding the technology available to you and keeping a human focus.

1. The data

A cloud transformation will surface vast troves of data about the performance of your contact centre, your customers’ behaviour and agent wellbeing. This data is gold, but you need to have the systems in place to analyse and learn from it, and to chart a path forward.
Be prepared to dedicate time to this. The information is there, but it won’t reveal itself by itself. So, make sure that someone in your organisation is responsible for digging through data, and trained/experienced to do so, or seek the assistance of a partner like Sabio.

2. The technology

Operating in the cloud makes it easy to implement and adapt functionality. But just like in the Transform stage of your project, any features you decide to add should be informed by data and support your business strategy.
It’s important to remember that small, iterative improvements are a far more efficient and sustainable path to progress than overhauling your functionality every few years.
So when Marks & Spencer noticed that a lot of their calls were being misattributed, we helped install a simple intent capture feature which shaved 10 seconds off every call on average and increased routing accuracy by 70%. Installing fully automated agents or encouraging customers to use an online chat feature may have looked like a more impressive solution on paper, but both would have been unnecessarily labour intensive and inappropriate for their demographic. Simple, small iterative improvements win in the cloud.

3. The people

Technology can only do so much – it’s up to people to bring about real change. That’s why it’s so important that your stakeholder team stays engaged, long after your cloud solution goes live. For many organisations, this will take some getting used to. In the days of on-site installs, there were very few decisions to be made once the system was up and running. Stakeholders could afford to be hands-off until a major system update was needed, and even then, it was often a rubber-stamping exercise.
Now, real decisions have to be made in real time. And the capability for change is only limited by an organisation’s appetite for it. So, it’s crucial that stakeholders stay close and enthusiastic at all times.
But it’s not just stakeholders who need to have their voices heard, but agents, too. As any new feature is implemented, they’ll likely have an idea of how effective it is before the data can show you empirically. Make sure it’s easy for them to flag issues, escalate problems and share praise on an ongoing basis. This will help you understand how technology is being received at a human level, but will also point to issues that cannot be solved with technology alone – like agent training and wellbeing. Remember, your agents are the only part of your business in constant contact with your customers?

Your journey beyond the cloud

Moving to the cloud will bring about significant opportunities in your business. But that’s the point. You don’t undertake something of this magnitude just to replicate what you already had in place.

At Sabio, we’re always on hand to help identify opportunities in your data and your industry. We can even help in training and staffing. But our ultimate goal is to give you the tools to act for yourself, because that’s when you can be most responsive, and most effective.
So, if you would like to find out more about how our team can help deliver real change in your customer experience, get in touch using the form below, or download our CX eBook.