While the majority of contact centres are using cloud technology to some extent, adoption for many is ‘relatively superficial’, according to recent conducted by Aspect Software.
Surveying 100 UK-based senior contact centre professionals, data indicates that even though the industry is ‘moving in the right direction’, Aspect believes the benefits of the delivery model for agent productivity and customer engagement will only be unlocked when contact centres ‘migrate more of their operations to the cloud’.
Research found that 78 per cent are currently using cloud to some extent, with the channel most likely to have been migrated being email in 60 per cent of cases. However, adoption of cloud technology in other channels remains low – 27 per cent manage their mobile apps in the cloud; 23 per cent have migrated SMS to cloud; 13 per cent have deployed cloud-based web chat.
Stephen Ball, SVP Europe and Africa at Aspect commented: “It’s clear that cloud is gaining ground in contact centres and that contact centre operators are increasingly comfortable with cloud delivery models, which is very positive. But at the moment many have only migrated a handful of applications and channels – what you might call the low-hanging fruit – and that doesn’t seem likely to change much over the next year. Even partial cloud adoptions can bring about positive changes within your organisation, but we’ve seen that the really interesting things only start to happen when bigger portions of the IT estate have been migrated.”
Analysts predict that this is unlikely to change over the next 12 months, as just 27 per cent of respondents claimed they will integrate new cloud-based solutions into their contact centres in 2017.
