Are you planning on migrating voice services to the cloud? You will need to conduct a careful network assessment and inventory of users’ devices – and that’s just the start of the process, according to three IT leaders at an Enterprise Connect discussion, “Voice Migration – Critical Issues for a (Still) Critical Capability.”
Melissa Swartz, founder, Swartz Consulting, moderated the conversation with Georges Habalian, regional consulting UC engineer, HCA Healthcare; Scott Johnson, global voice systems owner, collaboration services, Cargill; and Eric Zweigbaum, director of IT and global telecommunications lead, Conair.
Support your voice strategy
Moving to the cloud can advance your organization’s voice strategy said Zweigbaum, who helped move the international consumer products company from an on-prem to a RingCentral system about five years ago. “First, you should do an inventory to get a handle on what you have, as well as what your users would need after the migration,” he said. “You also need to look at your bandwidth, both internal and externa. We found that our switching system couldn’t support voice over IP, and we had to bring our trunk lines up from one to 10 gigs.”
Reliability is another tough issue, added Zweigbaum. Although initial assessments showed voice quality was fine, after implementation users were sending huge image files around the world, degrading reliability.
One of the Conair’s big challenge was user acceptance and training. “It’s been five years and we still have that issue today,” he said. “But there are some real advantages to moving to the cloud. When our call center in the UK went down, I called RingCentral and we had them back up answering calls within an hour.”
Best of breed?
With 70 business units in 70 countries, an all-in-one solution was not practical for Cargill, said Johnson. “You may not be able to have one voice strategy for a global company,” he said. “So, how do you pivot from on-prem solutions? We started with direct routing five years ago, and had one strong carrier provider do most of that work.”
Among the challenges Cargill faced were getting 10,000 phone numbers into one place. Then came the COVID pandemic and resulting shortages of chips and softphones. “We wound up having our voice guys doing logistics, trying to get the phones to the right locations,” he said. “Another big issue was 911 services as it’s not easy to bring common area phone registrations back online if they go down.”
A hybrid approach
In a hybrid working environment you need to flexible in your voice strategy, according to Habalian. “Reliability and regulatory issues are two of the factors to consider in keeping an on-prem voice solution. At HCA, we can have some verticals move to the cloud, but our hospital communications is still on prem.”
With cloud-based solutions, you need to stay on top of security threats like deepfakes, spoofing and authentication, added Habalian. “You need to balance functionality with security. Test out the new technologies and be sure you have safeguards in place,” he said. “Keep an eye on AI, as well, since every aspect of a contact center is affected by these applications.”
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