Cloud Source

Six Benefits of Migrating to a Digital Contact Center

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The contact center is categorized as a cost center, and, as a result, the C-suite may not prioritize an upgrade in an enterprise digital transformation plan. There are two key reasons why failing to invest in a digital contact center can be shortsighted:

  • The significant level of cost savings that is introduced with a digital contact center is measured in more than the monthly invoice. More on that later.
  • Customer experiences are often the sole differentiator between two brands. A streamlined communications format may give your competitor the edge.

These will be discussed more fully below, but these two critical issues make a migration to a cloud-based communications solution a priority on any digital transformation strategy. Here are six benefits you can expect to see:

Cost Savings: A subscription-based pay model is treated as an operating expense, rather than a capital investment. Also, your IT team will hand off all maintenance and troubleshooting to a third party. They will no longer own or upgrade any hardware, and invoicing captures only the number of users you need.

Improved Productivity: Research from Aria Solutions estimates that contact center agents spend up to 15% of their day looking for information. A digital contact center allows for easy integration with ERP and CRM solutions, making it easy for agents to gather information in real time and improve first-call resolution.

Customer Experiences: On the other side of that agent looking for information is a customer who is annoyed at how long they are having to wait for support. Customer experiences are critical and consumers are more aware of the customization and personalization that brands are willing to offer them. A digital contact center gives customers options to contact you in their preferred communication format, whether that’s voice, chat, email, or text.

Agent Retention and Satisfaction: With an upgrade to your contact center, you’ll introduce options for automation and free your agents up to handle more complex issues. When a customer is simply seeking an invoice total, order status, or hours for your location, an automated agent can handle these more routine and mundane requests.

Hiring Talent: When you implement a digital contact center, your agents are equipped to work any time and from anywhere with a connected device. This means that you are no longer limited to hiring from your immediate geographical location. You can hire the best talent, regardless of where they live.

Company Culture: A survey by Glassdoor found that more than half of employees prioritize company culture over salary considerations. When you allow your agents to choose their work location or split their time between your headquarters and their home office, they may be more satisfied workers with a healthy work-life balance.

If you would like to know more about the specific benefits that a digital contact center would deliver to your enterprise, contact us at Cloud Source. From determining your needs for a solution to calculating your potential savings with digital transformation, we can guide you through each step of the process.

The Intersection of Digital Transformation and Enterprise Networking

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Digital transformation has become so central to business, that it can be hard to separate from other types of objectives. Using technology to improve customer experiences, streamline productivity, and reduce costs is all part of the goal of digital transformation, and of the broader enterprise.

As organizations embrace this mindset, it’s important to note the comprehensive nature of digital transformation. With every adoption of a cloud solution, each implementation of a new digital tool, there’s an impact to the infrastructure. Enterprises need to be aware of how network infrastructure both shapes and is impacted by digital transformation.

In recent years, enterprises have favored alternatives to the costly-but-reliable multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) approach. With software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN), costs can be reduced by augmenting or replacing MPLS lines with a pathway-agnostic approach, utilizing a variety of delivery methods including broadband internet.

Research issued by Cato Networks from a survey entitled, “Networking in 2020: Understanding Digital Transformation’s Impact on IT Confidence in Enterprise Networks,” included responses from more than 1,300 professionals in IT careers.

The survey asked about a variety of network characteristics and how they relate to digital transformation, including security, agility, performance, and operations. The analysis broke down answers based on whether the enterprise used MPLS, SD-WAN or secure access service edge (SASE), which combines SD-WAN with other networking capabilities and security into a single, cloud-native solution.

A few key findings:

  • Budgets are growing in 2020 both in areas tagged for security and for networking.
  • Mobility is central to IT strategy, with IT professionals focusing on secure connections and adequate policy application.
  • More than 60% of respondents said their most critical applications reside in the cloud.

Network Confidence Shaken

The survey also uncovered some findings as they pertain to IT professionals’ confidence in their network in light of digital transformation goals. Here are a few areas cited for concerns:

Agility: While it’s expected that enterprises utilizing MPLS networking would note some difficulties with adding new cloud solutions or new branch locations, it was a surprise that those using SD-WAN also noted some difficulty in rapidly deploying new infrastructure for cloud solutions.

Security: Most SD-WAN solutions do not have security baked in as an integrated part of the solution; many require security features to be bolted on after implementation. Unsurprisingly, SASE fared better in this category because security is a native part of the solution.

Performance: Both MPLS and SD-WAN networks demonstrated difficulty with solution performance following digital transformation.

Management: While enterprises using MPLS reported some last-mile connection redundancy, SD-WAN and SASE seem to be able to automatically overcome any last-mile issues.

The survey results may indicate a few areas of concern for different networking approaches, but it also highlights the need for an implementation plan for network infrastructure that takes into account not only where the enterprise is today, but also what their networking needs are in the future.

Contact us at Cloud Source to evaluate the possibilities of a network infrastructure upgrade and how the right solution can equip your digital transformation process.

Establishing Parameters for a Network Management Strategy

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If your enterprise is pursuing digital transformation, it’s likely that things are only getting more complicated for your network. A network management strategy can help you avoid adding a maze of network management tools that add further complexity.

One network management tool would generally be ideal, but it’s often challenging to get everything you need in a single solution. Here are the three considerations that generally lead to the adoption of a management tool:

Ease of Use: IT teams are more pressed for time than ever, so if a network management solution improves efficiency in setting up or modifying monitoring, that’s often a solid vote for implementation. Teams are also looking for solutions that proactively alert them when there’s unusual activity on the network and allow them to easily gather information.

Teams often adopt a new solution because they have an important use case that isn’t covered by the particular tool they’re using. And many teams are looking for solutions with an application programming interface (API) that makes it easy to monitor a new virtual machine or application.

Cost: This is always a consideration when debating using one tool or several in a network management strategy. In many cases, a single tool becomes impossible because the introduction of a flood of new monitoring entities falls outside of licensing structures. Open source tools generally provide good protection against these cost issues.

Functionality: In the cloud era, where threats change by the minute, the evolution of monitoring technology tends to happen slower than the growth of monitoring needs. New tools emerge quickly, and IT teams are excited to deploy them. The nature of monitoring a moving target means that even a tool that works today could be immediately obsolete.

In order to balance these needs with the practicality of avoiding an overly complex and layered monitoring stack, enterprises need a solid network management strategy. Three elements should be included in such a strategy:

  1. Clear Policy Guidelines: A new network management tool can only be added to improve ease of use, reduce costs, or enhance functionality. Personal preference is not a reason for deploying a new tool, nor is professional experience with a particular tool.
  2. Replace, Don’t Add: When deploying a new network management tool, make it a general policy that another tool must be removed. When possible, invest in unitaskers, which tend to address groups or types of technology, such as mobile devices or a certain type of traffic.
  3. Determine Whether You Might Invest in a Manager of Managers: If there are reasons that you need to maintain a more complex set of management tools, consider placing a network management tool over your other tools, working as a single dashboard to alert you to network changes. You can also manage your other tools through this single management tool.

To learn more about solutions available for creating a network management strategy, contact us at Cloud Source. We can help you evaluate your needs and choose a monitoring solution that fits your budget and your practical requirements.

Five Enterprise Digital Transformation Challenges

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Digital transformation is foundationally based on a moving target, with almost countless moving pieces, including people, technology, business processes and a host of objectives. While organizations generally understand the critical nature of improving processes for the purpose of improving the customer experience and boosting productivity, they often don’t anticipate enterprise digital transformation challenges that can throw the vision off course.

These challenges come in a variety of forms, and, depending on their severity, can cause digital transformation initiatives to grind to a halt. Consider these five common enterprise digital transformation challenges:

Starting Blind: Line-of-business managers, executives or even IT professionals might begin to champion digital transformation for the organization, excited to gain the benefits that come with shifting a legacy application to the cloud or introducing a cutting-edge customer interface. In many cases, the enthusiasm to begin digital transformation makes the enterprise vulnerable to a critical mistake: starting blind.

It’s important that business leaders and key stakeholders have a clear vision for what the enterprise is currently doing and what opportunities are presented through a digital transformation objective. Beginning with detailed information on business needs helps shape the decisions about which solutions will deliver the necessary improvements. Companies that skip this step often regret their attempted migration, or they lose sight of the reasons behind it when they encounter difficulties.

Short-Term Mindset: Digital transformations can span several years and involve many teams in the organization. Those leading the initiative must proactively anticipate project fatigue. When staff exhaustion, time exhaustion and budget exhaustion set in, the organization can risk losing a lot of effort that’s already been invested.

It’s important to balance this effect by planning for some quick wins with initial transformation goals. Continue to break the process into steps that can be achieved in a shorter time span, taking time to evaluate the success of that phase and celebrating when it goes well.

Culture Changes: One aspect of digital transformation opens up opportunities while forcing some unprecedented collaboration. Cloud solutions offer enhanced communication tools and other features that serve to soften the divisions between departments and encourage the evaluation of business processes in a disruptive fashion.

Particularly across enterprises with far-flung locations or heavy concentrations of remote workers, achieving a cohesive, collaborative culture can be challenging.

Business and IT Alignment: Many enterprise digital transformation challenges can be summed up in this way: IT professionals are increasingly in the role of driving business objectives through technology investments, offering a new perspective that must align well with other executives’ visions for the company. Enterprises have no choice but to embrace digital transformation, but it’s also necessary for chief information officers to take the step of becoming champions for the cause.

If you’re facing digital transformation challenges you never anticipated, contact usat Cloud Source. We can assist with insiders’ tips to help you move forward to the next phase of your transformation and proactively prevent challenges that may emerge in the future.

Small Businesses Reap Benefits From Digital Transformation

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In many ways, digital transformation has leveled the playing field between small businesses and large enterprises. While in the past, only the biggest corporations could invest in the latest software solutions, the subscription-based scalability of cloud solutions has made the best technology available to even the smallest companies.

Many small businesses wonder if digital transformation is a good investment. While enterprises may see large-scale savings and impact on their bottom line, a small business may struggle to see those same benefits. But can a small business absorb the impact if an investment in technology doesn’t deliver the results they’d hoped to experience?

Small businesses can see those benefits, and they should invest in digital solutions. In fact, it’s advantageous to be on the front side of digital transformation, to gain significant advantage over competitors, rather than taking a wait-and-see approach and then playing catch-up later.

Considerations for technology investment: Small businesses need to make some decisions about the type of investments they want to make in digital solutions. Some possibilities include:

  • Improving the customer experience
  • Reducing operational expenses
  • Better analytics for informed decision-making
  • Agility and innovation
  • Implementing a digital ecosystem with partners and vendors

These considerations should be evaluated alongside the company’s strategic goals. Looking at where the company plans to be in five or 10 years, the solutions chosen for organizational efficiency will be a different investment than one that supports goals for customer engagement.

Short-term versus long-term investment: It’s also important to make decisions with a timeline in mind for the kind of digital transformation investments you’ll be making. A short-term investment is one that can be implemented right away without waiting for partners or particular market conditions. These should be planned with a specific timeline and return on investment metrics.

A middle term investment is planned for one to five years in the future, and will likely require hiring new talent and acquiring outside contractors. This looks more like a brainstorming of possibilities. Long-term projects are broader, with the assumption that they may involve a completely new business model or the expansion into other industries, taking the company in an entirely new direction.

Growth versus profit: Before making any decisions for digital investments, small business owners must have a grasp on whether they are prioritizing the growth of the business or increasing profits. This will have a heavy influence on how resources should be allocated for technology investments. It’s usually a good idea to invest in a solution that is expected to have a quick return on investment payoff and can fuel the adoption of another digital solution. This also has the effect of increasing employee buy-in on digital transformation.

Cloud Source is a leading technology services company that assists companies of all sizes with their digital transformation goals. Contact us to discuss your goals and we’ll help you identify the best solutions to achieve them.

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