The quality of your customer relationships and their experiences define your success. Time-strapped customers want personalized, hassle-free interactions across many channels. This includes digital channels as well as physical stores and branches.

Inadequate technology can hold you back. If it lacks omnichannel capabilities, you can’t offer consistent service across all channels and touchpoints. That’s because legacy contact center investments weren’t built to support modern customer engagement. And most weren’t built with the cloud in mind.

Let’s look at 4 challenges of operating outdated contact center technology and how to overcome them.

  1. Inability to Innovate

Competitive advantage is a sweet thing. But it can erode quickly. The risks of losing market share can be disastrous when you don’t act fast. That requires agility. But agility and innovation are difficult in a monolithic architecture built on antiquated methodologies and restrictive operations.

Older technologies can’t use innovations like artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver exceptional customer experience. You also miss out on cost savings reached by easily scaling up and down down during peak workloads and seasonal shifts in volume.

But indecision often causes many businesses to continue running critical workloads on outdated systems that are at end of support. Unsupported releases open you up to a minefield of problems— security vulnerabilities, compliance and incompatibility issues, poor performance and reliability, and high operating costs. Yet, executives are often reluctant to abandon on-premises technology they’re comfortable with. This is true even though a cloud contact center typically reduces costs.

By implementing proven cloud-based customer experience solutions you can optimize engagement across channels. And with a partner who’s focused on both innovation and your success, you can future-proof your business as it continues to evolve.

  1. Lack of Scalability

With an outdated contact center, scaling operations quickly and seamlessly without the need for additional hardware, servers, wiring and physical space, is near impossible. These platforms are built for a limited number of agents and don’t adjust to seasonal peaks, emergencies, service disruptions and other workload fluctuations.

  1. Slow Time to Value

In a highly competitive market, organizations must be able to quickly deploy new services to outpace their competition and remain relevant in the market. Outdated platforms impede new feature adoption.

Adding a voicebot or virtual assistant on an outdated system, for example, can take several months after ordering, building and deploying.

  1. Inflexible Architecture Can’t Adapt to the “New Normal”

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many companies to rapidly shift their contact center staff to remote working. Many outdated contact centers found it difficult to adopt a flexible work model. Additionally, because of technology constraints and low-quality VPN connections, these contact centers struggle to attract workers who now expect a fully remote or hybrid (remote and on site) workplace.

A Path Forward

Contact center vendors that lag in prioritization and investment in innovation are struggling to catch up. The only “cloud” they can offer customers is the same aging, on-premises software hosted on someone else’s platform. These solutions are subject to the same upgrade cycles, cost and inflexibility as traditional architectures.

In contrast, cloud-native architectures are scalable. They’re designed to take full advantage of modern contact center strategies and technologies.

Adopting a composable cloud platform makes it easier to create, test, iterate and deploy solutions. Composable CX platforms bring together data, actionable insights, systems, integrations and automation to fully orchestrate experiences.

And these platforms give you access to a global marketplace with extensive capabilities so you can mix and match, turn features on and off, trial, and add or remove to evolve your customer experiences.

Modernize Without Unnecessary Risks

The Genesys Prescriptive Migration methodology eliminates these challenges. It’s based on best practices, outcome-based use cases and architecture patterns. Our model uses repeatable steps that guide CX transformation and give you faster time to value.

From a top-level perspective, here’s how we help:

  • Work with you to gain a common understanding among stakeholders
  • Assess where you are now and where you want to be
  • Create your personalized CX transformation plan built on a compelling business case
  • Decide on a cloud deployment model

With our agile approach, you can evolve your customer experience in predictable, manageable phases – with a plan that translates into execution. We create a holistic reference architecture framework for infrastructure, functionality, integration and education.

An all-in-on cloud contact center platform offers offer business several benefits, including:

  • Fast, iterative upgrades with new capabilities available instantaneously
  • Ease of implementation and lower costs for incremental advances
  • Ability to innovate quickly with less risk and disruption
  • Built-in workforce engagement management capabilities allow you to unleash your employees’ superpowers
  • Differentiated customer experience for the long term
  • Agility to adapt to change quickly

Unmet customer expectations diminish your business success and viability. Cloud transformation has its risks but the risk of standing still is a far greater issue. Start planning your transformation to an open, stable and proven cloud contact center platform from a long-term partner — not a vendor. Find out how Genesys Professional Services can help you reach your goals and prepare you for the future.