Call centers, for all their progress over the years, are often still viewed as traditional enterprises – internal stakeholders can sometimes contribute to this perception by clinging on to legacy systems and processes. An ever-increasing number of businesses are adopting cloud technology or a DevOps methodology, but some call center management teams may be apprehensive about the potential risks involved when migrating. Experts agree, however, that the benefits far outweigh the challenges of the initial transition.
Your call center’s competitiveness in an ever-evolving, data-driven market largely depends on your ability to cost-effectively address customer requirements at scale while simultaneously deploying continuous improvement that keeps your call center on the leading edge of customer service delivery. By levering the benefits of cloud technology and the efficiency of the DevOps model, you can do just that.
The benefits of moving your call center to the cloud
Moving to the cloud is a transformational process for an organization. The task should bring into review how your call center develops and deploys changes so that you can take advantage of continual enhancements and features that are now available to you.
What improvements can you expect for your call center?
Fast deployment and implementation
Turnaround times for deployment and implementation in cloud-based call centers are quick and efficient.
Enhanced security
Cloud-based call centers follow standardized protocols that ensure security best practices are followed.
Scalable solution
Businesses can grow without stumbling blocks. A cloud-based solution provides flexibility for contact centers when adding and removing features or users.
Suitable for remote teams
Contact centers with agents operating across different geographic locations can easily manage their teams.
International brand consistency
For companies that have a global presence, cloud-based technologies allow their call centers to deliver a standard, around-the-clock service.
Easy Upgrades
Software updates can be done with minimal interference and no need for on-premise activities. DevOps teams will feel encouraged to innovate and improve products as the testing and deploying has become so seamless.
Real-time responses
Call center managers can monitor performance in real-time. If there are issues preventing an excellent customer experience, swift measures can be taken to rectify the issue.
How Cloud and DevOps go hand-in-hand
DevOps is about streamlining development so user requirements can quickly make it into application production, while the cloud offers automated provisioning and scaling to accommodate application changes.
DevOps strives for continuous improvement and faster delivery, just like Cloud operations work in a cloud environment where continuous improvement is expedited. When working together, these functions increase the overall quality of service delivery. While the two can operate without each other, Cloud gives DevOps the agility and flexibility to ramp up efforts and drive more effective outcomes.
What does DevOps bring to your company’s culture?
Your development and operations teams are under a lot of pressure to solve problems and enhance your systems on a day to day basis. Outdated working models usually mean that their efforts are siloed and restrained by heavyweight change approval boards. Resources are scattered throughout the business, and access is gated. This doesn’t inspire creativity in problem-solving and only serves to build backlogs of tickets and unique requests that have to be handled by the appointed individuals. Sometimes, this can cause a real imbalance in workload and ultimately lead to a poor customer experience (CX). This negative feedback loop hinders the overall culture of your organization and reflects poorly on your call center’s ability to work cohesively towards continuous improvement.
Moving towards a more agile methodology opens the door to new ideas, facilitated by improved visibility and better working relations between your developers, engineers, and operations staff. Automated testing and monitoring mean that any issues can be flagged up quickly, and teams can collaboratively work on solutions. Developers can programmatically jump in to fix scripts and allocate resources without having to go through the long chain of access permissions, which can often create friction and hold-ups.
When teams interact in this way, the necessity to repeat work or amend tasks due to miscommunication is minimized if not entirely eliminated. The increased transparency improves the first-time success rate of deployments because everyone can access data and get feedback much faster than in previous times.
All of these positive outcomes also help teams to get a better understanding of the real-time demands that customers have. This ensures that the applications being created to enhance CX are relevant and goal-oriented. When your call center succeeds on the front line, employees working hard to create the solutions which enable these wins feel instrumental in the growth of the business and more motivated to continue performing at high levels.
What DevOps brings to the end-user
It’s no secret that many customers are still hesitant to trust the IVR and AI systems. Although they want the speed and convenience of dealing with a call center, previous bad experiences can negatively impact the customer’s expectation of your service delivery.
Wouldn’t it be a pleasant surprise to be the call center that provides self-serve initiatives without the pitfalls? With DevOps, your contact flow will be significantly enhanced due to your ability to deliver continuous improvement. Your dynamic response to change means that your DevOps teams can create more personalized experiences for the customer that make their interaction with your technology increasingly more natural and efficient.
If you’d like to learn more about this topic, click here to view our Practical Guide to Implementing DevOps in your call center. In this guide, we break down the terminology you may encounter as you continue to research this new and exciting initiative for your business.
DevOps is no longer a buzzword. Organizations around the world are rapidly adopting the methodology and moving onto cloud-based platforms to create better assembly lines and make smarter investments in time and resources to ensure continuous delivery.
