Moving Your Call Center to the Cloud- Pros and Cons

00:00Hi guys, Tom Laird here. You've heard me break down contact center technology on the podcast time and time again. Now it's time for me to help you with your challenges. As your contact center technology advisor through our new company, Expivia Digital, I can help you with things like CCaaS selection, any type of AI implementation, and nice studio and integration services. It's the same honest advice you hear on the geek applied specifically to your operation. Visit ExpiviaDigital.com to get started. That's ExpiviaDigital.com. This is advice from a call center geek, a weekly podcast with a focus on all things call center. We'll cover it all from call center operations, hiring, culture, technology, and education. We're here to give you actionable items to improve the quality of yours and your customer's experience. This is an evolving industry with creative minds and ambitious people like this guy. Not only is his passion call center operations, but he's our host.

00:54He's the CEO of Expivia interaction marketing group and the call center geek himself, and host and creator of the Geek. I'm the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing. Expivia is a 500 seat call center outsourcer BPO located here in Northwestern Pennsylvania. So how's everybody doing? It's good to talk to you here already on June 4th, one month away from the 4th of July. It's crazy how this year seems to be a flying. A couple quick things before we get into today's topic. If you have not already, please sign up for the call center geek community. The call center geek community, we're going to provide some private webinars that are based on a lot of the questions and some of the things that have been brought up by people in the community and people that have emailed me. I'd like to have some of you guys be involved in some of these as well. So if you go to signup.callcentergeek.com, there's There's just a quick first name email address form that I can just shoot you out some details on that, shoot you out some kind of private blogs and try to get you some, I guess a little extra information.

02:23There's no cost, it's not going to be marketed, it's just really to join a community and just start a really a two-way dialogue with other call center professionals that are out there a little bit better than I think what the LinkedIn groups or any of those things are trying to do. So we're working on that. to be perfectly honest. So we got a community of four. I'd love to take some baby steps and maybe get a community of 20 by next week. Excuse me. The other thing I'd love to hear if you guys like the podcast, I'd love to hear some more reviews. Again, we're growing those reviews slowly, but I'd love to, if you could please take some time out if you If you found any value to please post a review on Spotify or on iTunes, I'd really appreciate it. Okay. Well, today, I was going to talk about our agent analysis program, and I'm going to do that next week about how we're doing weekly reviews for each of our agents that are based on things like their attendance, quality, attitude, effort, really taking into a holistic approach and how we are ranking our reps even if they're running different skills, types of programs. I think it's been a it's a cornerstone of our QA process but I wanted I wanted to do that this week but I've received a lot of emails over the last really month talking about the cloud and talking about why we like moving to the cloud why we liked the the flexibility and why I talk about the cloud I guess I guess in such high regard so a lot of people wondered you know what are the benefits of moving your contact center to the cloud what some of the pros, some of the cons. So I wanted to discuss some of that today. To give you some background on me so I can tell you how I think I'm a pretty good source to talk on this is I worked at a previous call center. We had an Avaya shop. We were in Avaya shop. So I worked on the Avaya Definity system. So really everywhere from the programming IT side of that, setting up skills, setting up agents, doing the routing which was you know really more of a real basic, easy to use language, if-and type statements. And also you know we were you know we had the two big well actually we had four PBX boxes you know that had the cards and had all kind of different kind of bells and whistles with that. We had some CTI integration on the on a dialer that we actually created ourselves. So I get the the premise-based solution. I was a big avaya guy and I was reluctant when we started Expivia to move to the cloud thinking that we were going to lose a lot of a lot of the technology that that is involved with those premise-based solutions that have been around forever and you know to be honest boy was I wrong and it probably should have been a move. Well maybe we couldn't have done that because it was so early on in the in the 2000s, but over the last five, six, seven years, the cloud-based solutions are crazy good.

05:27So again, I'm gonna say this as a caveat too. We use Nice and Contact. I'm a huge Nice and Contact advocate. I'm a huge Nice and Contact fan. I have demoed pretty much every other five, nine, eight by eight talk desk. I've seen a lot of them, and I follow a lot of what they're doing. I don't think there's anyone even close. So again, I may be biased, but to be honest, I am. I am biased towards the nice and contact product. I've also been able to get on the inside a little bit, being on their customer review board. So I kind of see some of the technology that they're working on too, and it's pretty sweet. So again, if I don't mean to make this be selling a nice and contact solution, But that's kind of my point of view, but I think a lot of this is pretty generic when it comes to talking about pretty much any of the cloud-based solutions.

06:25All right, so I got 10 pros that kind of came to the top of my head as I did a little bit of research here, and I got a couple cons as well. I don't know how big cons they are, but these are in no particular order, but this is really the 10 hugest, biggest, largest benefits that I see of moving your contacts into of the cloud and some of the things that we enjoy being in the cloud. Number one, and again, no particular order, number one is scaling. Being a BPO, we need to be extremely flexible for our clients. So being in the cloud allows us to scale, let's just say, hypothetically from 100 seats to 200 seats to 500 seats back to 50 seats if we needed to, and all in a one month time period for each of those. So you never have to worry about getting extra equipment, wiring new stations, really all you need are your booths or your desks, you need a computer and you need an internet source.

07:22And that's it. And other than that from a technology standpoint, you don't need more ports, more servers, any new cards to support any of your scaling issues. You can turn it on and turn it off instantly. So that's a huge benefit to any call center, especially one that's growing and a huge benefit to especially the BPOs that can get some volatility with different types of clients coming in and leaving. Number two is something that a lot of people don't discuss a lot, but I believe that there's less points of failure, believe it or not, using the cloud. So I don't have a server. When we had the Avaya system, we had four PBXs. Each of them had different cards in them. We had servers on top of that. We had CTI integrations with different servers for our phone system or for our outbound calling. So at any point we could have a card blow, we could have a server go down, we could have a hard drive go down.

08:16The cloud center, contact centers are fully redundant when it comes to that stuff. You don't have to worry about it. You don't have all these different types of wires as well, it's just one internet connection. So it's not all the different types of punch boards that you would have looking back at the old Avaya switches and the Mitel switches. So I believe that there's less points of failure, especially from your end, from the front-facing version or the front-facing options that you have. Number three, I think, is a huge benefit, and it's always awesome to have really big brother behind you where you can add new technology instantly. So let's say that you start in the cloud and you just want the ACD, maybe you just want to be multi or omni-channel, but then you have a board member that says, hey, I want speech analytics. Hey, I wanna, let's make sure we get our WFO solution.

09:06Let's get our call recording solution for a QA standpoint. All that stuff in the cloud can be turned on really instantly. So there's, again, there's no new servers. There's no guys that have to come out and set everything up. You're basically having a all-in-one box, right, when you sign up that you can just turn different switches on and off. So the newest technology is always at your fingertips. You don't have to have it, but it's always there, and it's always there instantly. So that's a really, really cool piece of being in the cloud, especially being, again, I've never, had to tell a client, I don't have that technology. Because I might not theoretically have it in my call center right now, but I could have it in my call center tomorrow. So that's a really cool feeling to know that, you know, these, if you choose the right one, the right cloud provider will always have your back with the latest and greatest technology at your fingertips.

09:57Number four, the entire world, I believe, not just even the contact centers, is moving really to an API culture, to moving to really open up everything and try to figure out what pieces of the pie do you wanna use. So the cloud contact centers have really embraced that. So there's an API culture that a lot of the premise-based solutions still don't have or don't get or are trying to move to. So for us, we have all of our in-contact APIs we're using in multiple ways from different reports to different things we're doing with the reps, to different ways that we're showing clients and giving them information. So there's a culture there that allows you to integrate with any process, any CRM, anything that you could possibly want. So it's such an easy process that you don't need heavy programmers to do that. But the culture's there to integrate and to be really fluid with all the new technologies through APIs.

10:52And that's one of the things that the cloud guys, I think, where they really, really get. Number five is really obvious, right? Number five has opened up because of the internet. It's opened up remote agents and really global access to seats. So now you can have, you know, you give your agents, and we don't do it just from a security standpoint, but anyway, you can theoretically, I guess, and a lot do, and a lot do it very successfully. Give your associate a computer, give them the proper internet access, and off they go. And you can have a full remote workforce. And there's a lot of BPO contact centers that are fully and only remote. I know that there's a lot of you out there that are listening to this that have remote agents as well that work awesome, right? And that's one of the really cool things about the cloud is it allows you to do any of that.

11:43And to tag along with that is your disaster recovery. Disaster recovery becomes so much easier because you're not blowing up servers, you're not blowing up PBX. The only thing that gets really hurt is maybe the actual workstation of the computers that the agents are at. So as long as you have a warehouse, or you got a room with an internet, and you got a computer, you're back up from a disaster recovery standpoint. So it's taken disaster recovery to a whole new level as well when you're in the cloud. Number six is reduced telephony costs. So I know exactly what my costs are by how many seats I have, which is a really cool feeling. [pricing remark omitted]

12:40Well, all that's gone, right? Because basically, we're going to get upgrades. And again, this is going to be number seven as well. Upgrades are kind of quote-unquote free, right? And I'm sure that I know that they're tied into your cost, but you know exactly how much your seat cost is. You know exactly how much is, you can forecast that out for the year, and it's much, much less than what most people are paying for a premise-based solution when you talk about the whole setup. So really cool process, really set everybody at ease. And it set a lot of our investors at ease as well when we initially were pitching to start Expivia. And I talked to them about costs. This was a huge seller for us. And then with number eight, that kind of goes along with those two things is the reduced IT costs. Now think about this, at the other BPO call center that I worked for in the late 1990s going through the 2010, we had about seven to 800 employees and we had an IT staff of about 25 to 30 individuals.

13:44We had programmers, we had database guys, we had telephony engineers. We had Avaya experts. We had an IVR guru. That was a crazy amount of cost. It was a cost that was needed, but there was so much programming and so much difficult server and network issues that would arise that you needed a staff like that. I have now 500 seats, so very close to what we were. I have two full-time programmers. I have basically somebody who works inContact and knows Studio really well, and they also help with screens and integrations and I have really a database type person who can do a little bit of all that as well. And that's it. We do have a junior programmer as well from our IT help desk if we have any issues from there and checking logs and making sure our PCI compliance is all good from that aspect.

14:32But from an actual programming standpoint, it's two programmers. And guys, I keep asking them how difficult is on the in-context head of Studio and they say, Tom, it's not even a real programming language. It's super easy. know, just the concept of programming, you can you can figure it out. So it makes me feel pretty good. I do every once in a while try to get in there and you know, I'll make a little adjustment, still get yelled at, they'll yell at me for that. But I want to learn it a little bit more. But again, you don't really even have to be a full hardcore programmer. If you have somebody even in high school or in college, that's kind of, you know, understand the concepts, you're going to be fine with with programming, a lot of the things from a routing standpoint, and even doing really cool things as All right, number nine is I call it worldwide supervision.

15:20So I have as long as you have access to the internet, you know, through security profiles, we give all of our clients access to their dashboard. So they log into an in contact login, and they see service level handle time, they see all their agents, their agents name, their actual state that they're in, they can double click on an agent, put their cell phone number in, have that ring to their phone and they can actually do live monitoring anywhere in the world. So for somebody who's maybe a little bit nervous about, oh, man, if I move to the cloud, think about the benefit of that. So even if you're, I don't know, bored on vacation, right, and your call center's back, like me, and you never really get away, you could actually monitor anywhere in the world. You can see your service levels. You don't have to call in and kind of ask what stats are.

16:06You can see the real-time data, historical data. All that is there as long as you have the internet. It's an awesome feature and an awesome world that we live in that we have that ability and that's a huge, huge benefit for us being a BPO and having our clients be so comfortable and us being able to be so transparent that they can get all of that information anytime they want. Number 10, and I think we've kind of touched on this, is really no equipment. You don't need a giant server room. You don't need a ton of money thrown into servers. We have one server that's a virtual server, and we back it up to AWS. And it houses all of our development. And some of the things that we're doing in the call center are on there. But other than that, we're using really outsourced resources from a storage standpoint.

16:58And anything else, it's handled in the cloud. So it's made it really flexible. It's been really cost effective and efficient. And I believe that with the technology that's out there, our technology is just as good if not better than anybody's, including the large call centers that are out there. All right, let's talk about the flip side of that coin. And what are some of the cons that maybe people have? And I'll be honest, I struggled a little bit with this. So if you guys have any other ones, I'd love to hear it and we can kinda discuss that. But one of the things that you do need that you didn't need before is you gotta have really, I wanna say expensive, but pretty expensive internet. you gotta juice your internet up. So we have two 500 meg pipes that come into Expivia, come in from different sources, different companies, fully redundant, and we're level loading them at all times.

17:49So making sure that you're only as good as your internet and you need fiber obviously, because you gotta have the upload and the download. So even if you're a smaller call center, you gotta get really good internet, because that's now really your telephony pipeline. [pricing remark omitted] Think about that, though. That's basically an IT person, a really super cheap IT person to take that. But you got to make sure that you're not, my recommendation is you don't go just to their customer service. Get a, you know, they call it, inContact, they call it a TAM, a technical account manager that's kind of dedicated to your account. They have a couple other people that they work with, but it's a very low ratio and and you have a one on one relationship with that person.

18:36The other thing that you need to make sure that can be a little bit of a scary situation is make sure you're researching the right partner. Again, highly recommend nice in contact from a technology standpoint. But if you don't get the right partner and their technology is not up to snuff, when you wanna do certain things, you're not gonna be able to and you're gonna be hamstrung because you're not gonna be able to go anywhere else. So make sure that you're researching that because you're only as good as your partner then, right? So you're as good or you're as bad as they are. The worst feeling about being in the cloud and everybody can relate to this is the helplessness of when you're down. Now, I will tell you that we are at five points of nine and when it comes to redundancy and uptime within contact, but there's still times that you're down, you could be down 15 minutes, you could be down 20 minutes.

19:24There have been in the past, I guess six or seven years that we've been using nice in contact over the last couple years has really not been a huge outage but we've had 45 minutes, an hour long outage that maybe once a year that those types of things happen and you need to make sure that your partner is getting out to you. That's the cool thing about Nice in Contact as well is they're actually proactive instead of reactive. If there's an outage, I get an email before it's even happening. If there's a large outage, they have a bridge line that you can stay on the whole time they understand you can't be down. So there is some of that and there's really nothing you can do. It is a very helpless, helpless feeling. So I would tell you though that we've had more outages and down times when we had the premise based stuff because you had more points of failure. But again, that doesn't mean anything when you're actually down.

20:18And then the last one that everybody talks about that I think is now, maybe it was legitimate at the beginning, but it's the security aspect. I mean, a lot of the cloud-based solutions, including Icing Contact, they have full PCI compliant clusters. Basically a cluster is where your account, your business unit is on. They also have FedRAMP clusters, which is basically the highest level of security that you can have to be able to work with the federal government. There's a ton of different security overlays that are played into every single solution that you have there from how things are encrypted when it comes to even the recordings, how you can do specific things with masking different inbound calls when somebody's maybe giving their social security number, their account numbers. Those types of things can all be handled and it can be handled with API so it automatically does it.

21:13So from a security aspect, I don't think that that is an issue whatsoever anymore and And to be perfectly honest, there's less housing in your facility with using the cloud than there would be if you had your own servers and having everything here. So that's why we are in the cloud. We initially really went into the cloud because of strictly of his cost. We were a startup. We were really bootstrapping at the very beginning with four call center agents. I'm sure, again, nice in contact was like, I can't believe we were even signing this guy. But they did. And I think for both of us, it's been a really good partnership of growth. And they've helped us and I think hopefully we've helped them and I've tried to do as much as I can to help that organization as well because they've been really good to us.

21:59Let me just throw this out to anybody. Again, I'm not here to sell nice and contact, but if you ever want to see a demo or if you want to see what it looks like to be in the cloud, to see what type of interfaces or what type of dashboards you can see and you can have and how the look and the feel is, you know, send me an email. It's tlayeredaddxpevia.net. Again, I'd love to just, I can just take 15 minutes and kind of show you what that looks like. Maybe it'll, maybe put you at ease or if you're thinking about moving to the cloud, I am an open resource for you to please ask me any questions or ask me any things that you guys are nervous about. I'd be more than happy to help you and try to guide you through that. Again, I wouldn't go anywhere else and I think, you know, the majority of people are moving this way, some quicker than others, but if there's any way I can help you in your move to the cloud or if you have any questions about it, again, Tlayered, T-L-A-I-R-G at Expivia, E-X-P-I-V-I-A dot net, or just find me on LinkedIn and you can send me a message, I'd be more than happy to help.

23:03So that's what I got for you today. I hope some of you guys who have emailed me that that's really wanted to sum it up and I know I haven't gotten back to all of you yet but the reason was I wanted to kind of sum it all up in a I think a pretty cool podcast that maybe ties a bow a little bit around the the benefits of the cloud. Again before I wrap this up please join our community signup.callcentergeek.com. Love to have as many people as we can join in a kind of a two-way conversation about a different call center and contact center topics. Again if you could please post a review or go to our Facebook page or our Twitter account and like or follow us. We're trying constantly to add new and cool content to you guys every single day. And if you have any questions about the cloud, want to see a demo, want to see what it looks like, even the speech analytics in the cloud is pretty cool, let me know and I can just show it to you.

23:55Again, it's not like I'm going to get anything out of that, I just want to just try to help anybody who's trying to look to maybe go that way. So again, thank you guys very much, and I will talk to you all next week. Thank you. This has been advice from a call center geek. Thanks for listening. Subscribe to the show. So you're the first to hear next week's episode jam packed with actionable takeaways. You can implement ASAP chime in with your thoughts on the episode on Twitter at from underscore geek and on Instagram at call underscore center underscore geek. Also take a look at our contact center operations book, but the same name advice from a call center Geek on Amazon. This podcast is sponsored by ExpiviaUSA.com.