As the COVID-19 crisis accelerated the digital transformation timeline across the business world, one estimate suggests we collectively crammed 5.3 years of digital transformation activity into the first half of 2020. Contact centres grew more critical to business success as organisations relied on them to nurture customer relationships through fluctuating service levels and an evolving world of work. This forced contact centres in every segment to become more agile in their operations and more flexible with their technical infrastructure, pushing the contact centre world across a major inflection point.

With the Cloud Transformation fully here in the present, the modern multi-channel contact centre has entered a Cloud-Smart Era. This next phase of cloud transformation moves from a reactive approach — solving urgent business problems with cloud-based solutions — to more proactive strategies for achieving key business goals. The paradigm around the value of the cloud has shifted: No longer narrowly focused on efficiency or cost-reduction strategies, contact centres are increasingly looking to leverage the inherent agility, flexibility and computing power of the cloud to do more — and be ready for whatever comes next.

The next phase of the cloud-powered contact centre is focused more on what and how than where, because the where will increasingly become a given: in the cloud.

These insights are driving our latest survey report on the State of the Contact Centre. Our 2021 report dives deep into this inflection point in the cloud transformation of the contact centre, revealing seven key insights:

• Key Insight #1: The cloud drives strategic business value — not just cost-optimisation.
• Key Insight #2: The cloud powers an analytics-driven approach.
• Key Insight #3: Cloud-powered solutions make AI & ML practical.
• Key Insight #4: Cloud-powered agility helps contact centres meet rising customer expectations.
• Key Insight #5: Agents are happier in the cloud.
• Key Insight #6: Cloud security fears ebbing — but data loss fears limit migration.
• Key Insight #7: Seeing is believing in the value of the cloud.

Download our latest survey report: State of the Contact Centre 2021: Cloud is here. What’s Next?