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hello to all our linkedin followers and welcome to today's session on cloud-based contact centers during times of change i'm david wasserman from nicest portfolio marketing team and today i'll be talking with chris bowserman one of our top cloud experts so welcome chris hi david thanks for having me so chris clearly the last few months contact centers were focused on ensuring the safety of their employees by moving everyone to work from home very quickly while trying to keep operations going seamlessly can you tell us what you've learned about the advantages of that initial move for those contact centers on a cloud-based foundation sure so you know one of the things that people talked about as a big benefit of moving to a cloud platform uh overall has been flexibility and agility and i think that really proved itself out um and then some in the la and the rapid move to work from home uh we're able to see with customers who are already running their contact centers on a cloud platform is it was really a business decision versus a technology decision so organizations that started to see early signs of at-risk agent populations were able to move all those agents home immediately and then when government orders came in to really uh shut down operations uh in the office we saw a thousand plus the organizations two thousand state organizations move their whole team home and get them up and working again uh from home within an afternoon so that agility really didn't pay off um you know on the flip side you know we saw organizations that that hadn't made that investment that switched to cloud um take a little bit more time a lot more steps um and you know it wasn't just a matter of a business decision you know they had to actually go through and and reconfigure networks get vpn access get desktops uh configured for the regions and so that was you know that was a matter of in many cases you know a couple hours of a move here on the cloud to several weeks if you were not on the cloud yet yeah so you know from what you've described clearly a cloud foundation enabled organizations to be super agile in the face of this crisis but in a typical contact center as you know there's usually an on-site i.t staff that handles troubleshooting on the desktop troubleshooting in the network um software and hardware issues but you know now that it staff like the contact center agents are at home how are contact centers actually addressing that under these circumstances that have a cloud foundation yeah well this is you know that's a great point and this is where having um having technology for your agents and your supervisors managers that's actually um simple um really makes difference i mean simple both in terms of easy to use but also simple to manage um because in a cloud environment uh much of the you know nearly all the it elements other than does your agents and supervisors have a laptop with a browser internet connection which is really all you need from your contact center in a cloud environment um everything else all the iot is taken care of by the cloud provider so in that sense really looking at the cloud provider having their operations being able to support them and asians aren't having to troubleshoot getting on with it and saying hey you know this windows driver doesn't work and my vpn connection you know is timing out how can i fix that and oops my kid got my laptop last night and changed that fragile thing that you worked with me on yesterday morning and now i can't sign it again so you know it really is that notion of a having um having all that i.t headache outsourced to a cloud provider um and b just removing a lot of fragile parts um that you know legacy systems that can go wrong and i think if you look at um you know if you look at sort of that that sort of elegance solution if you will that really pays off when you uh you need to move quickly and you'd have agents work from home yeah you know not a day that goes by chris i don't uh talk to someone who tells me that they're trying to reach a contact center and they're either put on hold or worse they actually get a recording or some type of message that says just try again at another time this is generally as i understand it driven by spikes and call volumes really across the board including critical industries like banking and healthcare that are very important to all of us how does a cloud-based solution position a contact center to better address those spikes and call volumes sure there's kind of three big areas and kind of a fourth kind of unique to some industries um but you know the first thing is you know you're never going to run out of technical capacity right so you're you're you know there's no server space to worry about right the cloud just scales up uh and what we've seen is in working with the number of organizations especially governments uh during this time of crisis that we saw you know we saw um call volumes go up 10 000 or more right you know 10 000 you know times higher so you know which is you know normally that you'll see commercial business maybe go up you know spike up 10x you know 100x so you're talking about thousands of times greater volume and the system just scales um so that's you know of course having the system capacity scales only one one part of it the next thing is you gotta have people right and so um so one of the other things that cloud does is it lets you tap into a much broader workforce more quickly so we just talked about how you don't need to have anything other than a laptop for a computer with a browser internet connection so you can all much more easily move supervisors managers back office workers or informal formal folks in to take contacts take calls and digital interactions so you can scale up your workforce correctly more quickly um but the third thing is you can actually pull in other sites right so it's not just having you know your one physical site in one city go from home and add some of the other staff to it you can have other locations if you're if you have a business that has multiple sites around the around the country around the world you can you can bring those in uh and you can also easily bring in third-party outsourcers the system so it's again a much broader range of range of people that you can bring in and all have them in the same queue uh route them the same ivr trees etc and then kind of the fourth fourth part of that is um you know kind of a often overlooked part of scale elasticity are the voice ports when it comes to calls and a voice port you know it's sort of uh you know a little bit technical uh but really what it means is having a void support um for a caller is the difference between calling in and being told you know through an ibr prompt that you're on hold and maybe you've got a wait time of an hour versus a busy signal right if you look at a busy signal that's the worst thing in the world right along with one thing um but this is sort of crushing especially talking about health care situations financial situations government services so by having all those voice sports in there we've done too is made unlimited free voice ports available to all the emergency responders governments and state local governments and national governments to help them through this crisis um and of course you know a a bonus fifth here because this is really is an important thing to talk about which is how do you adapt to keep your your citizens and your customers service is also being able to provide a lot of flexible uh options and modern features like scheduling callback time so if you do get that you know you do get through you don't get a busy angle you get through your ivr and you realize you can't self-service the ivr and you talk to someone um but you hear it's a two-hour wait which is not uncommon right yeah you can schedule hey you know send me a text let me serve a self source of the web or you know call me back in two hours right and make an appointment so i think those are all things that you can do that the cloud allows you to do to really help improve that customer experience and allow contact centers to be able to adjust and staff and manage these these really huge spikes yeah that's great you know one thing that i've been thinking about and actually i've gotten a lot of feedback from uh others about is you know it's as i think about contact centers it's common for them to schedule agents to handle it as expected interaction volume in the case of call spikes they bring on team leads supervisors trainers to handle you know that additional volume but when you talk about these really huge increases in volume uh clearly that won't be enough and i i was i was interested to ask you you know is that is it is it more feasible to handle those volumes when you've got a combination of at-home agents and a cloud foundation is that better able to serve businesses than maybe even having agents in the office yeah well i think you know one of the the big benefits of of a cloud platform is that it's really designed to be virtual right it doesn't know a physical boundary right so um yeah so that whether you're at home or in the office or across multiple offices right you know as you mentioned you can you can kind of look at a distributed set of agents and supervisors right that are at home in a certain geographic area as a virtual site virtual location but you know but if you've got some you know some other agents that are you know 100 miles away 500 miles away whether they're whether they're sort of a virtual physical site or just you know a number of people who you've been able to keep working remotely and sort of a you know a great way to uh you know hire and keep good people you can bring all those people in and you're gonna have all the flexibility about you know how you route them how you tie them in to provide service but um but again you can really tie that into any location any office and including tying in business process outsourcers which have excess capacity and kind of tying them into your system as well and you can do that without having a physical constraint so they can all be a single queue single ibr prompt single set of skills um so you can actually really balance that uh you know balance that cue across as many locations populations of asians as possible makes sense you know we've we're going to change things up a little bit you know so far we've talked about what i think of is kind of the hard foundation of a cloud-based solution but as i think about all the other critical applications that sit on top of that foundation things like scheduling performance quality management all those things that help a contact center meet their business kpis how does that change when you move to agents from home specifically on a cloud-based foundation well i think you know every organization when they first with their agents from home in a rapid fashion you know uh you know a month and a half or you know two months ago um you know had to relax through apis a little bit right there and say hey this is different you know kind of everything is disrupted um but you know but now as we're looking at it around the world you know we're seeing that things are starting to you know just sort of reopen or shift a little bit back to normal but you know but that what normal looks like you know is not everybody goes back in the office everything turns you know turns normal so yeah i think what organizations realized the last few weeks is you really have to start building upon how do you how do you restore the level of productivity the level of proficiency and the quality of customer service in this remote environment that you had before i think a couple you know a couple big ways that the cloud can help with that is as i mentioned before that it is designed to you know to be complete virtual virtual environment by default so and and so a lot of the things in terms of applications like coaching uh performance management feedback management uh you know all these things that you know maybe in the office you had a wall board of a very pretty giant monitor that listed leaderboards and challenges and you know and how the team's in their kpis or are you kind of listened in you know with a side jack needers listening or watching over someone's shoulders they're servicing a customer kind of coaching them one-on-one live those things don't work anymore so so but but you know a cloud platform is designed to work from everywhere so that things like performance management gamification um you know listening and whispering in the agent's ear virtually has all been built to work that way so it really is uh designed to be a collaborative coaching um performance driving environment no matter where you are and i think that yeah kind of having all those applications that are designed purpose built for running in the cloud for virtual teams i think play a big part in restoring that productivity and that level of quality and performance yeah so just one last question i'll again i'll change it up a little bit we've obviously talked a lot today about cloud-based foundations but i think about all those organizations that are on an on-premise infrastructure what are you hearing that they're doing now as they kind of look forward into the the new normal and how they're thinking about what potentially leveraging a cloud foundation as a really a longer or maybe even a medium-term approach moving forward well i think you know any any big disruption like like we're experiencing tends to accelerate trends that were already there and we're surely seeing that with a lot of our organization so even if you've been able to to move your agents to work from home mode uh with your legacy on premises systems you know typically those systems are kind of designed to kind of handle a snow day a short disruption as you talked about earlier you know a lot of it uh you know i t support issues you know collaboration that isn't really working there to help drive asian performance so what they're seeing now is hey this is the new normal as you said we've got to do some things really help be more agile be more optimized you know from either full work from home or a partial work from home or on again off again work for home environment and and really the natural answer that is moving to the cloud and and so i think you know what we're seeing is we've actually seen um you know large organizations that we've set up special offers for move to the cloud within 48 hours and then restore that full business productivity over the next uh several days so moving the cloud can be fast right so you only want to do it you can it's not like you have to wait six months to get it done and it helps you with that ongoing uh productivity asian performance and quality of service but the other big thing that we didn't talk about yet is is cost you know cost savings right i think everyone's feeling pinched on revenue and moving the cloud already has a you know a great roi over time but you know by moving fast and by being able to get the those benefits quickly you can actually you know get a net benefit to your budget within a quarter or so right so people looking to cut costs this year you can actually move to the cloud modernize your systems get that you know get that performance and agility but still save costs this year so you know there's there's no time like the president as they say and i think that's you know true for organizations looking to accelerate that move to the cloud terrific well chris this has been a great discussion it's clear that a cloud foundation is certainly the only way to rapidly ensure business continuity and successful agent-home approach during the crisis and an ongoing strategy in a world that's really in constant change so thanks again for taking the time with us today i appreciate it a lot my pleasure and be sure to join us next week to our linkedin live audience as we continue our series on customer service in times of change until then all of us at nice wish you a great rest of the week stay safe stay safe stay healthy bye you