To remain competitive and provide the expected customer experience, more and more organisations are looking at cloud contact center solutions – and to you, as a partner, to support their cloud migration projects.
To support your customers in the best way possible, as system integrators / partners / VARs, you are going to have to sacrifice a very healthy and profitable revenue stream.
By this, we mean that in order to deliver the best solution to the majority of your customers, you will need to be ready to move them from an on-prem contact center over to the cloud. This, of course, means that you’ll lose those profitable maintenance contracts that made up a significant proportion of the margin within an opportunity.
Being able to look at and adjust to the new opportunities that are presented through CCaaS will allow you to bridge the gap that this loss of maintenance revenue has created.
In this post we take a look at these opportunities and how adding assurance and validation testing supports ROI for your projects. {{cta(‘7a480b6c-529b-4ae9-aa1b-9a3b7b592bc2′,’justifycenter’)}}
#1 Secure migration projects
The obvious opportunity is being the partner that migrates the customer over to cloud. But first, you need to ensure that you are the provider that carries out the migration.
Implementing a new system is the perfect time for a long-standing customer to dip their toe in that competitor pool. Adding assurance and validation testing into your migration process can help you to avoid this.
One of the biggest fears organizations have about moving to the cloud is relinquishing control of the infrastructure. They have to take your word that the solution will be able to operate comfortably at the anticipated levels and have very little opportunity to validate this themselves.
Adding a load test as an assurance and validation step into your migration proposal will allow you to carry out full stress testing across the customer’s entire infrastructure to ensure systems are operating to specification.
Results can be shared with the customer to validate that their cloud deployment continues to operate as expected, even when experiencing peak traffic conditions. This, in return, allows you to be confident in your solution and will differentiate yourself from competitors.
#2 Migrate customers faster and more cost-effectively
The DORA State of DevOps report highlighted that deployment times are 200 times faster when using automated testing methodologies.
By automating the testing required during the migration, you can accelerate development, assure quality, and eradicate risk.
See how you can add cloud migration testing technology without the price tag here.
#3 Become indispensable to your customer
Getting the customer onto the cloud is only the first step of the journey. Once they are there, you will need to make them ‘stick’.
Zero commitment cloud solutions, by their very nature, allow your customers to work with competitors and investigate new systems at their leisure. If you’re not front and center addressing their business needs, it’s all too easy for them to look elsewhere.
So, how can you mitigate the risk of a customer moving away and instead drive retention?
By continually delivering the new services and features that are constantly being released within the contact center system for your customer’s contact center.
The more you can offer, the more their reliance on you and your expertise will become – and through creating a multi-faceted user experience you, also give them no cause to look at any other options.
Just like the actual cloud migration, the features and benefits of assurance and validation testing support you in delivering these new services and features quickly and cost-effectively.
#4 Introduce new revenue opportunities
With so many moving parts, issues will undoubtedly occur from time to time when updating the contact center infrastructure.
Introducing monitoring as a proactive resolution will enable platforms to continue operating as expected. This ensures system stability and that the desired customer experience is consistently delivered for your customer.
Validation allows you to offer services such as these, that provide value for your customer, but also act as new revenue opportunities that you can use this to offset the loss you are incurring through the lack of maintenance contracts from on-prem deals.
#5 Grab market share
Gain a stronger foothold in the cloud contact center space, as with any major shift in technology, those companies that are able to embrace and adopt the change quicker are going to be those that are able to grab more of the market share.
#6 Long-term customer retention
Maintaining relationships with your current customers to delight them long after they purchase your product or service should be your main goal.
Research shows that it is easier and more cost-effective to retain customers than to acquire new ones. In fact, only a 5% increase in customer retention can increase company revenue by 25-95%.
Retention is influenced by successful onboarding, speed of adoption, ultimate utilization, and proficiency.
We have seen how validation testing can support successful onboarding, speed of adoption, and ultimate utilization, by delivering the features and services that are available through the contact center system. But what about proficiency?
Proficiency is displayed by the understanding of your customer’s business goals, and by being able to continuously deliver those tools and features needed to address those goals, consistently and cost-effectively.
Validation testing allows you to tick all four of these boxes in a cost-effective and efficient manner.
Want to know more about how validation testing can accelerate your cloud migration projects?
Watch our on-demand webinar here.
In the webinar, we discuss how adopting automated validation and monitoring into your technology set ensures that you are perfectly positioned to bring your current on-premise customers and new customers over to the cloud and drastically increase your chances of retaining that customer in the long term.
