With today’s contact center technologies, enterprises can work flexibly in a manner that suits their workplace culture, customers, and agents best — that is unless they're still on-prem.
Though the pandemic prompted many contact centers to migrate to a contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) option, other enterprises have yet made a cloud contact center migration or still have no plans to do so whatsoever. According to managing director of contact center practice leader for Deloitte Digital Timothy McDougal, a survey of 135 contact center organizations showed that
Deloitte found that only 32% of them were running CCaaS at the end of 2020.
While 75% of all contact centers surveyed plan to continue or to begin to invest in CCaaS, that leaves 25% of organizations with no cloud migration plans. Aside from regulatory concerns that might impede a move to the cloud, McDougal sees four big reasons why enterprises might not want to move to CCaaS. They are:
- A previous on-prem decision — Some enterprises are effectively stuck with an on-prem system since they made an on-prem contact center investment recently and haven’t had the chance to depreciate it entirely.
- Lingering cloud security concerns — Although McDougal can’t recall any major cloud contact center breach, McDougal says some enterprises still have security concerns on the cloud.
- A focus on more pressing IT decisions — Some contact centers are focusing on CRM or other application development and “haven't gotten around to cloud telephony,” McDougal said.
- A lack of a compelling business case — Without a full digital transformation strategy, contact centers might be leery moving from an on-prem contact center to a cloud one based on the cost difference, McDougal said. “My advice to clients there is to think about how to transform your business, as you think about implementing cloud telephony and moving one platform to another.”
These factors may be why contact centers haven’t made a cloud migration, but there are costs associated with a reluctance to migrate, said independent contact center consultant
Nerys Corfield.
Major contact center providers have gradually moved their investment from on-prem to boost their cloud-based offerings, which will in turn tip the scales in favor to cloud despite the higher seat price, Corfield added. If your enterprise is committed to reinventing customer service with digital transformation, “then you got to go to a next-gen cloud solution because that’s where the … R&D dollars are,” Corfield said.
Now, enterprises that still rely on an on-prem contact center system with no plans to migrate find themselves in a quandary: either stick with their on-prem system for as long as possible or take the time and resources to build a strong business case for CCaaS. While there are no right or wrong options — just what works best for the enterprise and its users — the contact center market and the lack of on-prem support and updates might push enterprises to reconcile their misgivings and migrate to the cloud.
