It’s a topic you’ve probably read a fair bit about. After all, moving the infrastructure that powers your contact center to the cloud has the potential to turn a major capital expense into a more manageable monthly operational expense.
With the cost and efficiency savings that transitioning to the cloud can bring, it’s no surprise to see spending forecasts projecting that digital transformation will reach $2.3 trillion a year in 2023 and account for more than half of all IT spending.
The Contact Center-as-a-Service market is likely to become an increasingly large slice of this pie, with research indicating that this segment should grow by at least 23% this year and next.
Given these factors, it’s clear that businesses and enterprises with contact centers supported by legacy systems and physical infrastructure are ready to follow in the footsteps of digital-natives and offload this to the cloud.
Here are some of the main methods to consider:
Hybrid on-Premise/Cloud Solution
A great first step is to opt for a hybrid solution that gives you the benefits of the cloud but easily integrated with your existing PBX and on-site hardware, helping you increase the ROI on this spend and manage the digital migration at your own pace.
Most businesses with on-prem contact center infrastructure have probably tested SIP trunking, which is a great way to extend the reach of your agents into new markets without the need for dealing with local carriers and the headache this can create. According to Nemertes Research, as much as 57% of enterprises are using or plan to use SIP trunks to cut the cost of their communications.
- Increase ROI on existing infrastructure
- Interoperability with legacy system
- Manage pace of digital transformation
- More expensive than a pure cloud solution
- Still need to manage multiple legacy providers
- Still need to maintain legacy systems
Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS)
The most straightforward choice for businesses looking first and foremost to move their customer voice and messaging interactions to the cloud is a hosted Contact Center solution, which provides an all-in-one solution and easily managed platform.
- Easy to set up
- Rapid deployment time
- Monthly billing model
- Potentially limited coverage
- Risk of vendor lock-in
- Scaling can be expensive
Building Your Own Communications Stack
Giving you the ultimate control over your communications, this doesn’t need to be as daunting as it sounds. Whether you wish to build your own components or use existing best-of-breed solutions, this enables you to optimize at each core layer of your comms stack: platform, call logic and infrastructure.
A great example of how easy this can be is the emerging trend for BYOC, or Bring Your Own Carrier. In essence, this lets you use a CCaaS or Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) for your contact center platform and call logic, but choose your own provider for underlying voice and messaging connectivity instead of relying on the aggregated coverage that typically comes bundled with these solutions.
In this way, you can extend the reach of the platform to new markets and scale more cost-effectively.
- Greater control over comms
- More cost-effective scaling
- Wider global coverage
- Best-of-breed at every layer
Voxbone provides the underlying voice infrastructure to the majority of Gartner Magic Quadrant leaders in cloud communications, including RingCentral, Dialpad, 8×8, Aircall, and NICE inContact, as well as leading businesses such as Uber.
