Remember when Black Friday was actually just on Friday? I do. And I remember my local supermarket setting up for purchase returns on Monday morning, like clockwork. That’s because the spike in consumer behaviour from the Friday to the following Monday was highly predictable. Up until five or six years ago, seasonal spikes were safely bound by time and channel, which made capacity planning relatively clean.

Today, we have multiple weeks like Black Friday. In addition, Cyber Monday has created an entirely new category of shoppers, who expect a certain kind of digital offering and communication across retailers. Not only do we have to deal with less predictability in terms of the shift in consumer behaviours, but all of this becomes more challenging when we consider that the overhead price of preparation is greater than the actual utility of our seasonal communications.

My colleague Abi Chandra uses this analogy: “Imagine owning a two-seater car that you bought to use in your day-to-day life — getting to work, doing the weekly shop and an occasional trip to the cinema. But, at Christmas, you have 30 family members coming to visit. To accommodate this, you buy a bus to transport them around to family outings over the weekend. When they all leave, you now own a bus that you park in the drive. You also have to pay for all of the maintenance and taxes on that bus. Sure, it’s sitting unused now, but you take comfort in the fact that you’re prepared for next Christmas. But, your family is growing. In the back of your mind, you wonder if that new bus will be big enough for next year”.

The bus analogy is a picture of how many companies manage their voice-channel capacity to meet the needs of a seasonal spike. Arguably, the most painful part of this is the cost, which includes buying more capacity than you actually need. And that’s because your reputation depends on it.

And this isn’t just true for retail. The same story is played out with tax returns, tax credits or student finance, for example. The challenges of capacity planning and cost of ownership involved are actually problems of scalability. The process of pre-securing capacity for seasonal spikes—or any kind of sudden increase in future call volumes—happens because the underlying technology only scales with manual intervention, with premiums on time. The inherent scalability and automation of a properly designed cloud solution solves that problem altogether.

Automated Capacity Meets Modern Needs
Let’s revisit our family Christmas using a cloud version of our day-to-day two-seater car. In this scenario, whenever we pick up a new family member, the car automatically adds an additional seat. It doesn’t matter if there’s 1 or 31 passengers; the cloud car continues to expand to meet the immediate needs of everyone in the party. When they get out, the car scales back down to its minimum configuration of two seats. The bottom line: No matter how many customer calls come into your business—planned or unplanned—neither you nor your customers know that they’re using a freshly up-scaled system to handle the immediate increase in capacity.

And the Genesys® PureCloud® application was designed specifically—from its beginnings—to handle these particular problems. From a high level, let’s look at how the PureCloud product changes your business processes.

PureCloud Scalability and Your Call Centre 
First, all of the time spent preparing the underlying technology is no longer needed. A typical business using a traditional contact centre solution does all of its planning and equipment purchasing in July, configures in August, battle-tests in September, tweaks in October — and then hopes that all of the capacity backups are ready for the spike in customer-service volumes during November and December. In a cloud world, that time is better spent on creating and preparing customer experiences that will boost your reputation during the high-traffic moments. You could let the cloud architecture take care of the real-time work of technological capacity.

Secondly, backups and overhead failover equipment are no longer needed. The PureCloud application isn’t one system sitting in a single server room that needs another system to be ready in case there’s an outage. Cloud design relies on massive duplication.

At a high level, imagine multiple concurrent copies of a system that are equally capable of handling calls. If one goes down, there are tens or hundreds of other concurrent, live copies already available while the problematic one is automatically replaced. This type of resilience and scalability is active for all of your customers’ preferred channels.

It’s worth mentioning that we’ve been focusing on the largest challenge to managing the voice channel. The PureCloud application offers the same treatment for all channels. In fact, it unifies all channels so you can gain the highest utilisation from your agents. The PureCloud app can send multiple, concurrent SMS, email, chat and social interactions to your agents with prioritisation for voice. Scalability planning across channels is no longer needed—every agent shares the same interface for any interaction. The cost savings in workforce utilisation are significant.

Finally, the cost savings for seasonal preparation are the best part.

The traditional cost of ownership drastically shifts from overpaying for capacity and backups to only paying for what you use. With the PureCloud application, there are no creeping costs for scalability—because that capability is already part of the underlying product. Your costs only involve your channel traffic.

Think of it as owning a two-seater cloud car that behaves like a car with 2000 seats when it needs to—without changing your monthly car payment. You pay for the petrol, not the capacity. And you never pay for guessing incorrectly in terms of capacity. You don’t pay for backups, overhead or five-year contracts. Those days are gone. Scalability, resilience and unified channels are all part of your PureCloud subscription. You agree to a one- or two-year commitment that’s paid monthly. The pay-as-you-go feature lets you turn your operation from a cost centre into a profit centre.

Be Ready for Anything
The PureCloud application lets you meet the changing needs of your consumers. It takes the guesswork out of preparing for temporary customer opportunities and puts cost controls back in the hands of your investment goals.

With the PureCloud product, you’re ready when your customer interactions spike over the voice channel on Black Friday and when they shift to the digital channel on Cyber Monday.

Take a guided tour of the PureCloud application to see how it can help you meet customer demands and improve your customer experience.