8×8, CCNG: Contact Centers Are Moving to the Cloud
More than 70 percent of contact centers have moved to the cloud or are planning to do so, according to a new study.
A survey of 154 contact-center companies conducted by 8×8 and CCNG found that more than half (53 percent) have at least partially transitioned to the cloud, with an additional 20 percent planning to make a transition in the future.
“Clearly what this research is showing is, the cloud is real, and the cloud is imminent if not [a reality] now with a number of customers,” said Max Ball, product marketing manager for 8×8’s contact center domain.
For those who have plans to eventually transition, 38 percent say they will do so within three years, while 56 percent have no timetable. Ball said solution providers need to take note of how determined most of these contact centers are to go to the cloud.
“To a channel reseller, do they have a model where they can support the cloud?” he said. “And they need to understand that the cloud is real; the cloud is coming, and that they’ve got to decide where they’ve going to fit.”
And it differs based on size and preference.{ad}
“If they really need contact center to be something that drives a ton of services, then cloud is probably OK, but man, you’re going to really be looking at just the very big guys where you’re really doing more of a hosted solution than a true multi-tenanted cloud solution,” Ball told Channel Partners. “And if you’re kind of a mid-tier guy, you probably need to figure out how are you going to sell this with much lower services but with much more volume and much more getting your money off of the software instead of the services piece,” he said.
Along with the respondents’ widespread acceptance of cloud-based contact centers came several concerns. Half of contact centers listed quality of service as their biggest worry, and 47 percent said they were worried about security.
Another interesting concern was reliability and uptime (49 percent), which Ball said was strange, because 43 percent of respondents said they want to go to the cloud in order to get business continuity and disaster recovery.
“There’s kind of some schizophrenia out there in terms of people understanding what makes up reliability,” he said.
The other two big reasons contact centers want to be cloud-based were the ability to scale up and down (41 percent) and a lower cost of ownership (40 percent).
