It was a startling outcome back in 2011 when IBM Watson trounced two Jeopardy champions in a highly anticipated match-up. It took IBM years of preparation and loading a roomful of servers with 200 million documents to get Watson in fighting shape. 

Audiences were in awe of its cognitive power and speed. Watson showed us a new level of artificial intelligence (AI). Yet, most of us never imagined how much farther AI could take us or the massive growth of data created by AI.

The future has arrived. Businesses will soon be operating in a world of hundreds of yottabytes. For context, according to Backblaze, a yottabyte of storage would require a million data centers. (Watson, in its winning debut, used 1 TB of data.)

The scale is a fundamental challenge for businesses. They need to manage, store and secure all that data. It’s a necessary element in driving differentiation. And it allows them to make every byte available to every authorized user — at any time.

Why Your Data Is Gold

Data is often likened to gold for businesses. In our digital age, it has massive value. It’s the fuel for AI and it’s how AI learns. 

From your data, AI can identify patterns, make predictions, and generate insights that inform and drive decisions and innovation. The more data AI has access to, the better it can serve businesses.

However, data isn’t necessarily useful in its raw form. It needs to be collected and normalized to get those golden insights. 

And with data sources widely dispersed across multiple platforms and often unstructured, there’s little opportunity to see what’s going on with your customers at the experience level. And it’s nearly impossible to understand the relationship between the employee experience and customer experience (CX). 

Accessing massive volumes of data from multiple sources also complicates its management and governance, including privacy, security and ownership. Successful companies treat data with care and urgency. It’s your asset; if it’s not being used properly, how many opportunities are you losing?

The Urgency of Moving to the Cloud

Even companies that don’t operate in the cloud understand the need and that adoption of the cloud is all but unavoidable in the long run. The cloud offers clear advantages:

  • Flexibility and scalability – You don’t need to change hardware or software to adapt to dynamic markets. It enables you to grow as needed.
  • Ability to innovate – It’s much faster to develop and launch new features. You also gain access to modern tools with common user-friendly interfaces.
  • Cost savings – With less capital investment on a pay-as-you-go subscription, you’re able to grow at your preferred timeline. And because vendors manage systems, fewer of your highly skilled staff are needed for maintenance.
  • Risk reduction – IT manages more centralized operations across multiple channels.

It’s also important to remember that operating in the cloud means you can use the power of AI to access and use data. That’s a differentiator in business.

When that data resides on a single cloud platform, you’ll have countless more opportunities to support all areas of your business and create positive customer experiences. 

Consolidate Vendors and Start Innovating

In on-premises environments, multiple vendors and their standalone solutions created increasingly complex environments, often called “spaghetti” or cobbled together “Frankensteins.” Even in the cloud, if you have your customer data in different places, it’s difficult for AI to make use of that data.

With an all-in-one platform, data is easily shared across an organization. It’s a single solution that eliminates the need for patchwork systems and multiple vendors. And you can easily integrate applications to quickly spin up an instance or do a proof of concept.

For Northumbrian Water Limited (NWL), which serves 4.4 million customers in northeast England, a desire to transform its customer experience led to its cloud migration.

Its service requests were mostly over the phone, but NWL had no way to handle spiking call volumes and no way to deflect calls through digital channels with its disparate on-premises systems. It was time- and resource-intensive, leaving little room for innovation.

Consolidating on the all-in-one Genesys Cloud™ platform enabled NWL to interact with customers on digital channels. It also removed significant risk and expense. 

The entire cloud platform was live within six months — the same amount of time it used to take NWL to integrate a single chat solution with its previous infrastructure. Within two weeks, NWL saw an 89% fall in its phone transfer rate and a six-point rise in customer satisfaction.

A single platform also reduces risks associated with security, privacy and liability. Although businesses practice due diligence for the individual security features of any AI-powered applications, cloud consolidation means they typically only need to monitor compliance and security for one provider.

That’s because the future of moving to a cloud platform is already accepted for the most part, leaving most questions about the infrastructure. Genesys Cloud runs natively on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which means you get the benefits of AWS security compliance. Its infrastructure ties together governance focused and audit-friendly service features with applicable compliance or audit standards.

Shape Customer Journeys with Data-Driven Experience Orchestration

An AI-powered cloud platform allows you to not only collect data but turn it into valuable insights. Using that real-time data to coordinate every step of every customer experience is the essence of experience orchestration. 

Together, AI and experience orchestration give businesses a holistic view of customers and insight into customer engagement. By leveraging the power of data, analytics and automation, businesses can deliver the right information, at the right time, to the right customer, across all touchpoints. 

AI-powered experience orchestration allows enterprises to identify key behavior patterns, create smart triggers for automated actions and collect data to deliver the personalized experiences customers expect. 

Aligning Employee and Customer Experiences

When transitioning to the cloud, the needs of employees can end up second in line behind customers. That’s because workforce engagement management (WEM) is seen as completely separate from the bigger picture. But this approach only prolongs the silos that a single platform can eliminate.

If you’re moving to the cloud, the best way to optimize customer and employee experiences – and ensure they’re in sync – is to keep your data in one place.

Aeromexico understood that access to data on a single platform was paramount. As Mexico’s flagship carrier, Aeromexico is always looking for ways to enhance customer service. That includes offering consistent and personalized experiences.

But the inflexibility of a legacy on-premises system in its contact center was hindering innovation to not only provide a great customer experience but also improve employee engagement. Relying on an externally hosted server in a vendor facility, the company lacked real-time access to data. This limited its ability to effectively manage call flow and staff schedules, as well as make quick, data-driven adjustments.

By making employee experience a priority, intelligent contact center staffing enabled Aeromexico to make quick adjustments, such as being able to pivot when weather impacts schedules. In fact, using WEM for scheduling and forecasting has given Aeromexico a time savings of around 66% with complete visibility into all customer interactions. The company didn’t have to choose between siloed options.

Discovering Data Gold with an All-in-One Cloud Platform

The key to success for most businesses is customer-centricity. To build this into a customer experience strategy, every on-premises business will need to transition its operations to the cloud. With the latest advances in AI capabilities, delays are costly while the rewards are significant, as Aeromexico discovered.

We’re way beyond the early days of IBM Watson, as the pace of AI-powered tools and technology accelerates. The innovations available now enable you to surface valuable insights from your data and capitalize on new ways of working. 

But if that data is disparate and in different tools and different systems, it’s going to add unnecessary work for your teams and diminish the results. Starting with a common data structure on a single platform means that all areas of your business can benefit from the new data gold.

At Genesys, we take a methodical approach to helping customers move to the cloud. Find out more about our proven processes and how our customers are thriving with the “Genesys prescriptive migration” ebook.