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Everything You Wanted to Know

About Cloud Contact Centers
- A BFSI Perspective!
Two years ago, we spoke to several BFSI
organizations and talked about the need
to migrate their contact center to the
cloud to truly derive the benefits of
flexibility, scale, and easier support for
more and more features.
Our appeals were met with stoic silence.
We were told that they were not looking
at the cloud, and they aren't letting their
data get anywhere outside their premises.
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While we had great success in other
verticals, BFSI was a challenge as they
weren't convinced about cloud contact
centers. And, we don't offer an on-
premise solution at all.
Then the pandemic happened, and we
received inquiries from a few BFSI
organizations asking us if we could
quickly help migrate their workforce to
work from home to answer customer
calls and queries.
We did!
We then slowly migrated their on-
premise completely to our cloud contact
center in due course of time.
So, we wanted to attempt a paper to
address everything you would like to know
about cloud contact centers for the BFSI
segment. We have done this in a Q&A
format for a better understanding.
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What is a cloud contact
center?
Cloud can be a misleading term, to begin
with, with different flavors of IaaS, PaaS,
and SaaS. Then you throw in all the
marketing hype, and you are really not
sure what you are getting into.
It gets iffy for decision-makers.
So, we want to spend time defining what
a true cloud contact center is.
A full-blown cloud contact center will
have the following attributes:
You'll be able to administer your
contact center platform as if you were
on-premise
Support true multi-tenancy – sharing
data and storage
Built as-a-service technology, allowing
you to easily administer, tenantize,
and segment data
You don't manage or maintain any
hardware servers at the data center
You don't need to sign a massive
contract with the vendor for the
number of seats or contract duration
Now that we know the attributes of cloud
contact centers let us dig into the benefits
that it brings you.

What are the benefits of cloud contact centers?

It is simple for you to deploy, manage, and sustain. You don't need to maintain a
dedicated team managing your contact center infrastructure. Whenever something
new is available for your services, your tools will be updated automatically, including
all the latest fixes and security patches

You can scale up and down as you like. Adding features will be straightforward on the
cloud infrastructure without disrupting your operations. Besides, you can scale up and
down the number of agents that you have on the cloud platform easily and quickly – it
would just take minutes to add or remove agents on the cloud

It saves on costs. You don't need a dedicated team to manage your cloud
infrastructure, which is a significant saving. You don't pay any hefty license fee for the
platform, no hardware licensing and maintenance components, and it adds to the
savings

Now that we have spoken about the broad benefits of cloud contact centers, what about
security?

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Is your cloud contact center secure?
Let me explain why your data is safer in
the cloud than on-premises.
First, most organizations don't have the
financial or technical nous to provide the
same security benefits as large cloud
service providers can.
Availability of your data - When you
have your contact center on the cloud,
data is stored in multiple data centers
that are geographically independent, with
redundancy implemented throughout the
system. Your data gets distributed to
multiple data centers – if one goes down,
your data will fail over to another
automatically.
Large cloud providers also protect
availability through virtualization. When
servers are virtualized in the cloud,
providers can easily migrate the servers
from one data center to another if a
failure occurs. Most on-premise systems
may have just two physical servers that
fail over to one another, which isn't
helpful if there is a network outage or
natural calamity.
Physical security is expensive – do you
have guards, mantraps, and locked cages
for your servers? Most likely, no. Cloud
providers spend the money on round-
the-clock guards and state-of-the-art
physical security controls. The best part is
you don't have to worry about it.
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Technical security – some of the biggest
security breaches happen because of poor
patching because you don't have full-time
teams addressing the vulnerabilities. In
contrast, large cloud providers have full-
time teams who handle patching round-
the-clock for known and unknown
vulnerabilities.
Besides, cloud providers have full-time
staff monitoring their security operations
center round-the-clock against attacks.
The most common way attackers get into
networks is through phishing and email-
borne threats. The attackers almost
always enter through user workstations,
which is very likely in the premise
environment. They seldom come through
the server environment. All your
workstations are completely segmented
on the cloud, and users aren't sitting on
the network where the data lives.
Encryption – large cloud providers offer
military-grade AES 256 encryption right
out of the box so attackers won't be able
to read any data they might steal. This
would require loads of knowledge and
high-staffing cost in the on-premise
environment.
Well, this sounds so obvious and interesting.
How do you integrate cloud contact centers
with other best-of-breed systems, and how
does that look after the integration.
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How do you integrate your cloud contact center with
other systems?
No one benefits from information silos. Cloud contact centers come with API integrations,
allowing multiple systems and platforms to be tightly integrated and provide one view of
the customer data points.

Cloud allows quick and simple integration with various business applications, such as
CRM, helpdesk, ERP, and social media applications. Cloud platforms can better integrate
with self-service platforms like chatbots that may resolve customer queries without agent
interventions.

In traditional systems, the same data is stored in multiple systems and are updated
manually, resulting in errors. In comparison, with a cloud contact center, an integrated
platform makes the same data available through the customer journey. So, if a contact
center agent updates the billing plan of a customer, it gets reflected in accounts, CRM,
sales, and other departments that need that information.

How does the workflow appear now that we have an

integrated cloud contact center platform?
Let us assume that you are a banking customer and you are calling the customer service
number.

Agent: Sir, the

transaction value is more
Agent: Hi Sir, I see Agent: Thank you Sir,
than what is allowed in
that your last your verificiation is
Incoming your account. I am
transaction was done. You can do the
customer call enabling it for just one
declined. How can I transaction now.
transaction now. Before
help you?
that, can I do some basic
verification?

Agent gets access to

Can you please help Please. I would be
CRM information -
me process this happy to help you Great. Thank you.
salary account,
transaction? with the verification
personal loan, last 10
transactions

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The agent was able to automatically perform a CRM lookup based on the caller's
telephone number. It throws up relevant details, and the agent was able to connect the
likely reason for the call.

The entire call flow was structured around the experience the customer would get. The
whole process took less than 3 minutes, and the intended purpose of the call was
achieved with an integrated cloud contact center platform.

I am impressed with what I have read so far, but I am told that the cost of the cloud
infrastructure far outweighs the on-premise solutions. What do you have to say about that?

How does the cloud contact center cost compare with the
on-premise solutions?

This is a very interesting question. It works both ways depending upon the angle you look
at it. Before getting there, let us understand the costs involved in a contact center.

What are the different costs Integrating the various channels

of a contact center?
Dialer costs
Voice infrastructure costs
Hosting the dialer on a server either
locally or at a data center
Integrating the dialer platform with
multiple other departments and
systems
through which you offer customer
experience with the contact center
platform – voice, IVR, click-to-call,
email, web, SMS, chat, video, and
social
Managing patches, upgrades, and
vulnerabilities of the infrastructure
Customization of the workflow to fit
your organizational needs
Ongoing maintenance and support

These are the overall costs involved in running a contact center.

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Let us look at the on-premise model first.

You will have to pay a hefty license cost and commit to the vendor on the number of seats
you purchase on different channels upfront. Likely, you may not use everything you buy
right from the beginning.

Besides, you will sign an annual maintenance contract to be covered with upgrades,
patches, and vulnerability fixes.

You will also have to factor in resources that would ensure the security and availability of
your infrastructure. You will have to upgrade your server and voice hardware every three
years, as they become obsolete both at the hardware and the software level.

Now, look at the cloud offering.
There is no CAPEX that you incur. You
will be billed on a per-minute basis – this
includes dialer, voice, integrations,
maintenance, upgrades, patches,
vulnerability fixes, data security, hosting,
customizations, and all the channels.
Now, a cloud contact center definitely
would mean better ROI both in the
short-term and the long-term.
I get an idea of the cost of a cloud contact
center and how it can be advantageous.
What about the time that it takes to
implement a cloud platform?

There is no annual maintenance control,

and you don't need resources to manage
and sustain the infrastructure.
Besides, you can scale up and down the
number of agents per your needs. There
is no upfront commitment on the licenses
and the number of agents. You pay per
your use.
All your agents need is an Internet
connection, access to a browser, and a
headset to be up and running to provide
the best possible customer experience.
What is the speed of
implementation of a
cloud contact center?
We have migrated agents to work on our
cloud contact center within 24 hours
during the pandemic. We have migrated
thousands of agents within the time
frame.
We are talking about hours here.

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When you compare this with conventional contact centers, we are looking at multiple
weeks to get the contact center infrastructure up and running. Then, you have the
problem of managing hybrid working, which is cumbersome with an on-premise solution.
You will have to create VPN connectivity for every agent to access your on-premise, and it
is a bandwidth-intensive solution.

That's a lot of advantages. I have issues hiring the right talents to manage our contact center
channels. Would cloud help in that?

Does cloud help hire the top talents?

With the cloud contact center, location ceases to be an issue anymore. You can attract
talent from across the world as the agents can quickly hook up to the customer
experience system and engage with customers from anywhere in the world.

Now you don't have to stick to locally hiring talents, and you can look at hiring them from
all over the world.

Cloud contact center has proven to be the choice that contact centers need to look at for the
various advantages that it brings both operationally and cost-wise.

Is there a flip side to it?

Though the pandemic accelerated cloud migration from the second quarter of 2020, it still
hasn't reached the level that people predicted.

I read a Deloitte survey on the cloud migration of contact centers. Only 32% of them were
running cloud contact centers at the end of 2020. While 75% of the contact centers
surveyed plan to continue or begin investing in cloud contact centers. This leaves 25% of
organizations with no cloud migration plan.

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Some of the reasons could be:

I have made an on-premise investment recently and haven't had the chance to
depreciate it entirely. By the time it depreciates, my people may possibly have gotten
used to the on-premise platform, and I have to factor in the learning curve of
migrating to the cloud.
The unfounded security concerns of having your data on the cloud – to date, I haven't
found even a single major cloud contact center breach. As explained earlier in this
piece, a cloud contact center certainly has better security vis-à-vis on-premise
solutions.
Some customer experience functions haven't evolved to the level of contact centers,
and they are figuring out their CRM and helpdesk options.

Conclusion

The customer experience functions in the BFSI environment have been highly aggressive
in the last couple of years.

BFSI segment has been inundated with calls from customers seeking emergency loans,
COVID assistance loans, payment deferrals, mortgage holidays, insurance claims, and the
like. This has allowed BFSI to evolve many compelling business cases and develop a digital
transformation strategy.

BFSI segment wanted to quickly create and scale the infrastructure needed to meet and
exceed customer expectations. This means process automation and back-end innovation
combined with the right contact center platform to deliver the experience.

Most banks and insurance companies zeroed in on cloud contact center platforms to
deliver the experience? After a few months and quarters, they feel vindicated with their
decisions to move the cloud contact center way.

Besides, the options for on-premise contact center vendors are also decreasing - all of
them have either started offering cloud platforms or are migrating to the cloud.

Let us cloud!

08 www.cleartouch.in