Every race car driver wants to be in the pole position on race day. The term, which was adopted from horse racing, means that fastest-qualifying car driver gets to begin the race at the front of the pack — in the front row on the inside lane. This position is coveted because, statistics have shown that in all races in Formula One history, more than 40% of wins have been claimed by drivers in the pole position. Qualifying with the fastest times and achieving the pole position is the result of an artful, yet scientific, amalgamation of car, crew and driver. It takes a team to get there.

In the current contact center world, we’ve witnessed a massive race to the cloud. Folks who just a few months ago would not even think of disposing their beloved legacy monolithic on-premises solutions now can’t wait to get to a cloud customer experience solution. Contact centers in every profession, every industry and every vertical are considering cloud options. Everyone wants to get there quickly; they’re all gunning for that pole position.

Here are three must-have pieces to move you to the pole position among your competitors with an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered, cloud customer experience solution.

  1. The car: the power of an all-in-one sustainable platform
    All race cars are designed on a chassis to provide maximum forward velocity while providing downward force that keeps the car grounded. This enables the driver to apply as much force while navigating turns without worrying about the vehicle flying off the tracks.

Your cloud customer experience solution should be built to provide similar agility. Cloud solutions like the Genesys CloudTM platform are built on a microservices architecture to provide that extreme flexibility, instant scalability and high elasticity. And these cloud solutions provide all of these capabilities while maintaining high availability across geographic regions. This makes your contact center aerodynamic enough to navigate peaks and valleys of your business environment.

Much like a well-designed race car that can handle any conditions, your cloud contact center platform should be able to handle any changes in the market. When the market pivots, you can too — seamlessly and at record speeds. With a cloud contact center, you have choices. You choose which applications, such as enterprise collaboration tools, IVR, workforce engagement management tools and predictive engagement, to deploy based on your business strategy. Such cloud architectures allow you to add new features and functionalities incrementally and continuously as — and when — the business race demands it. There’s no more waiting for release cycles to update your technology.

In addition, you don’t have to give up on the customizations that make your contact center experiences unique.  Rapidly deployable public APIs allow seamless integration of capabilities to provide industry- or vertical-specific journeys that your customers have come to expect.

  1. The crew: a collective of information and experiences

Every race car driver is only as good as the supporting team, the crew. They’re not there just to fix problems and change the tires. Drivers rely on the crew’s collective sharing of many race experiences to make on-the-spot decisions. The crew sees a larger picture than just the road in front of the driver. Race car maker McLaren is already testing AI co-pilots in its new models, thereby engineering a more powerful and intuitive driver performance differentiator on the track.

Only an all-in-one cloud contact center platform can harness data from all sources, applications and touch points and then convert it into real-time and historical actionable insights. The cloud provides instant on-demand computing power that AI technologies need to collect, synthesize and provide accurate analysis that contact center employees can use to make real-time decisions.

Gone are the days of isolated spreadsheet applications and on-premises relational databases. Now, the reports they generate are rendered redundant even before they’re printed. Genesys AI-based applications like predictive engagement, predictive routing, agent assist and workforce engagement management tools provide insights at every step of the customer journey.

3.The driver: the one with their hands on the wheel    

Not all your contact center employees will be naturally talented at handling customers and interactions.  They’re going to be as good as the tools and training they’re given. As James Hincliffe, IndyCar driver on Team Genesys, said, “I’m definitely not one of those insanely naturally talented people. Let’s put it this way: My first Go-kart race was horrendous. Like you didn’t put me in a Go-kart and I was like instantly fast. I had to work at it. I had to figure out how to be fast.”

Emotion is the biggest variable that affects contact center agent performance. Cloud contact center solutions with the latest reactive style presentation formats feed and maintain the positive mood required from our front-line personnel. This doesn’t just include intuitive user interfaces, suggested responses and a CRM data dip. An all-in-one cloud customer experience solution enables organizations to track and retain customer information from web visits, IVRs, chatbots and other touch points. Companies can deploy AI in real time, providing history, context, content and sentiment so that, when a live interaction is initiated, the agents begin the conversation several layers deep and steer the customer in the right direction.

Read this tip sheet for 12 signs it’s time to upgrade to a cloud contact center and then get ready to take the pole position among your competitors.