For 2,500 years, lighthouse beacons have served two purposes: to warn mariners of dangerous shallows and rocky coasts, and to guide vessels safely into and out of harbors. Even as GPS and other maritime electronics replace the need for physical lighthouses, their purposes as digital beacons still serve ships navigating the oceans.

As you plan to migrate your contact center applications to the cloud or build new ones, the options are almost limitless. Having a beacon to guide you during your journey helps keep you on track so you don’t lose sight of your goals — even in unpredictable conditions.

Cloud Migration Is More Than a Technology Upgrade

The concept of migration can sometimes feel daunting. But like any journey, it follows a logical progression to a destination— at whatever pace your business chooses. And even though every organization is unique, all migrations begin with a mindset.

If you think of a migration as just a significant upgrade to technology, you’ll end up with what you have now, and you’ll miss its more profound benefits.

Migration is a process.

Some businesses take off with the cloud-native approach and use serverless technology to build new applications. For existing apps, you might use containers or serverless structures. Or you could shift applications to an Infrastructure as a Service model to benefit from being cloud-scale first and then modernize them later.

Whatever approach serves your needs, it should be about more than improving organizational and technological performance. Ultimately, this journey aims to improve the quality of customer and employee experiences — and reduce your time to market for updates and new products.

Focus more on understanding how you can use cloud solutions to keep up with evolving business needs and maximize your investments in new digital technologies. Your plans should clarify how the cloud will help increase your agility, responsiveness and productivity as you get to market faster and speed up app development.

Consider all the options and what matters most for your cloud adoption: what’s realistic and what are the use cases that will get you to the proverbial shore safely.

Prepare for Any Rough Waters in Your Migration Journey

The steps along the migration journey are rarely direct. Depending on your business and goals, a lot of variables can affect you. Think of unexpected organizational changes, changes in workflows or market pressures, such as the recent economic downturn or the price of gasoline.

Like a ship trying to navigate its way into a new harbor, a plan designed with flexibility guides you around the obstacles. The plan isn’t reality; it’s your best assumption of what you want to achieve.

You’re less likely to go far off track if you’ve secured executive buy-in and sponsorship. When something unexpected hits, you’ll benefit from having executives step up, reinforce goals, and consistently model the new way of working and thinking.

Get All Hands on Deck

Employees involved with the cloud migration still have their regular jobs — whether it’s in IT or customer-facing roles. Think about how you want to involve them in your planning because a cloud migration also affects culture. And that might require new skills and training. Assess those skills before developing any plan and address those gaps upfront.

You’ll also build consensus if employees feel their concerns are being heard and their ideas considered. By doing this, you’ll avoid potentially costly missteps that occur when you simply assume knowledge of employees’ day-to-day jobs. Go to the source — you’ll earn their respect.

There’s also the risk of business disruption, around data in particular. Build your understanding of how your business uses data and the interdependencies. This will help you decide which data to move first and the sequence of the moves.

One approach to mitigating this risk is to take a small part of an application and move it to the cloud, along with the associated data and code. From here, you’ll gain a little insight, have minimal disruption and engage business users in the process.

Celebrate Milestones with Rewards

As remote work continues to dominate many industries, employees are less engaged with colleagues, partly due to limited interactions. Because of that, they lose a sense of empathy for each other.

During a cloud contact center migration, you have an opportunity to counter this by celebrating success along the way. As you check off completed tasks, moving on to the next step is easy.

Don’t take shortcuts. A “celebration” is an acknowledgement of a job well done. It could be as simple as giving away unique project T-shirts or calling out someone who might not typically be recognized. This is another opportunity for executives to share progress and call out exceptional work.

Acknowledging contributions creates a badge of honor and demonstrates respect. It encourages involvement and helps align people to program goals. Weaving these moments of success into your migration will give your program an identity.

You’re creating a more collaborative environment and reinforcing commitment as a team. You all win or lose together. Make sure the same beacon guides everyone on your migration team.

Read this guide to take your cloud migration to the next step.