To keep up with the pace of innovation and remain competitive, businesses across all sectors are moving to a cloud contact center. But the move from an on-premises solution to a cloud platform doesn’t have to — and often shouldn’t — happen overnight. In fact, organizations are more successful when they look at the move to the cloud as a customer experience (CX) evolution — not a lift and shift.

Let’s look at some common considerations when modernizing to a Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution, explore ways to ensure the move is seamless for your users and your customers, and find out how three companies benefited from their move to a cloud contact center platform.

Voice in the Cloud

While customers have grown accustomed to the speed and convenience of digital channels, self-service and bot-led experiences, the voice channel isn’t going anywhere. And much like digital, customers expect voice to be efficient and effortless.

However, a common concern companies have with migrating to a cloud-based contact center solution is the quality of voice traffic, especially if it’s moving across multiple regions. The footprint of a large, international organization only exacerbates this concern.

While ensuring high voice quality is obviously a top concern, it’s just a part of providing a consistent customer experience. It’s also essential to maintain a common call flow that the customer can control.

Solutions exist to ensure there are no quality issues when moving voice to the cloud. For instance, the Genesys Cloud™ Global Media Fabric allows customers to configure their organization’s contact center so that any group of users and any trunks within the organization can be associated with a specific Genesys Cloud region. This reduces the distance traffic must travel — and that minimizes degradation.

Moving forward, providing great customer experience will require organizations to balance voice with other channels and features that the cloud provides.

Complex Routing Architectures

Over time, many organizations with on-premises or hosted contact centers have developed highly customized — and complex — routing systems to match customers with agents. The shift to CCaaS doesn’t mean you need to rebuild these systems from the ground up. In fact, it’s a perfect opportunity to reconsider what works — and what will make the customer experience even better.

The cloud allows you to reimagine what’s possible and introduce new features, functionalities and efficiencies. Genesys Cloud has no-code orchestration tools available to easily configure routing flows, which gives customers the control when orchestrating experiences for customers and employees.

Security, Privacy and Uptime Assurance

Security, privacy and uptime are table stakes for organizations of sizes and across all industries, especially in the public sector. Customers expect that their personal information and data will be protected.

Contact center security must be one of your top business priorities — and it should be a top priority for your contact center partners, too. In the cloud, security is a shared responsibility, with each organization playing their part in this crucial business activity.

To ensure resiliency and business continuity, Genesys Cloud uses a high-availability approach in which the full set of services are deployed in multiple independent Amazon Web Services (AWS) regions globally, in an active-active-active architecture and across a minimum of three AWS Availability Zones per region. Availability Zones are isolated data centers within an AWS Region to offer redundancy and physical separation as well as provide infrastructure for failover.

Integrations with Your CCaaS Solution

Maintaining integration with the contact center software solutions your organization uses to engage with customers is crucial. For many organizations, this encompasses their CRM system or workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions — but it doesn’t have to stop there. To maximize success when moving to the cloud, ensure the CCaaS platform allows you to create an integrated portfolio of systems and services with simple integration methods.

The Genesys Cloud platform includes open APIs, industry-standard developer tools and configuration points that allow you to easily customize integrations. This also gives you the flexibility to decide how your systems work together, even as service providers change. And a platform with a robust and active app marketplace of marketplace of pre-built appsintegrations from trusted partners enables you to quickly address your unique processes and use cases.

Transforming CX Across Industries With the Cloud

Genesys has already helped thousands of customers — small and large — make the transition from an on-premises contact center to a cloud contact center platform. While everyone’s CX evolution journey is unique, here are a few examples that illustrate the potential across a wide range of industries.

Bringing More Digital Channels to the Contact Center

A leader in the digital transformation of its own industry, Schneider Electric sought to transform its customer and employee experience by adding complete self-service. Schneider recognized that a move from its Genesys Engage™ on-premises solution to Genesys Cloud would simplify the management of its infrastructure, facilitate interconnections between countries — for 24/7 skill sharing — and help the energy provider implement new digital channels.

The move has created consistency, improving both the customer experience and employee experience. Support moved to an omnichannel strategy that engages customers in the channel they prefer — whether its phone, email, chatbot or the company’s mySchneider self-service portal. And employees take advantage of Genesys Cloud integration with Salesforce, ERP and other systems to update information through a single interface.

“We wanted to handle real-time interactions through aggregated routing strategies directly to our agents and bots,” said Jean-Pierre Nicolas, Customer Support — Project and Run, Digital Sales and Support at Schneider Electric. “Genesys Cloud enabled all of this while maintaining the same ergonomic agent interface with zero risk. This cloud platform allows us to create a holistic customer experience and simplify maintenance.”

Enhancing Contact Center Efficiency and Strategic Value in Insurance

A multinational financial investment management and insurance company was on a mission to modernize and transform its technology. With multiple contact center locations across several countries — varying between six and 600 contact center agents — the company’s IT teams were spending too much time simply “keeping the lights on.” The company wanted to transform its technology and give the teams the ability to create strategic value that would differentiate it from others in the market.

To solve this, the company moved from Avaya to Genesys Cloud. The move allowed the provider to efficiently configure routing flows – a paradigm shift from how this was handled with Avaya. It also leveraged a pre-packaged integration through the Genesys AppFoundry® Marketplace to seamlessly integrate its existing WEM solution. And the public API set allowed the company to quickly see where it could innovate next — and how quickly it could happen.

A Clean Evolution to the Cloud for Stanley Steemer

As a nationwide company with both direct and franchise sales, the cloud seemed like a no-brainer for Stanley Steemer. An evolution to the cloud offered the cleaning services company significant remote work benefits, improved service capabilities, cost efficiency and resilience. But, as a company with multiple franchises and offices, the move to the cloud needed to be seamless for everyone.

Switching to Genesys Cloud allowed Stanley Steemer to effortlessly route inbound calls to the right franchisee. And it simplified communications for agents — the majority of whom work from home. The cloud also brought redundancy, while eliminating the need for multiple admin apps and expensive MPLS connections between data centers.

Perhaps most importantly, Stanley Steemer has been able to use the powerful features of Genesys Workforce Engagement Management to optimize resourcing to accommodate massive shifts in workloads between seasons (and even days). This meant the company didn’t need to operate as a “hire-and-fire culture” — and it improved employee retention.

The Time for CCaaS Is Now

A move to the cloud is a catalyst in customer and employee experience transformation. To remain competitive, it’s not a matter of if but when — and how — your organization will adopt a cloud contact center platform.

While a CX evolution requires planning, you don’t have to feel like you’re starting over. And you don’t have to do it alone.

For a fast and effective transformation, look for a partner who has the experience to keep you on track and help you meet your goals at every step of the journey. To learn more, read “Six stories of successful cloud migrations” and gain insights into how other companies have benefited from a move to the cloud.