The word Cloud used to represent nothing more than “a visible mass of condensed water vapor floating in the atmosphere”. Fast forward to the beginning of this millennium, when the word Cloud suddenly represented a new and improved method of storage and communication, albeit widely regarded as a luxury to be admired from afar.
It is now clear to service providers that adopting a cloud strategy, will result in a growing amount of contact centers and back offices that will fully recognize the core benefits of a cloud deployment.
That’s all well and good. But how?
I believe that cloud migration is a journey, and like every journey, the most challenging part is always taking the first few steps.
This is the perfect place to clear up a misconception—cloud isn’t all or nothing. For example, many customer service leaders when considering cloud, make the assumption that they will need to move all the component applications of their Workforce Optimization suite (WFO) to the cloud at once.
This is why I think that Workforce Management WFM section of the WFO Suite is an ideal pioneer test case.
Above I noted that a core benefit of cloud is flexibility, so you can expand and contract your footprint to match your workforce. That is particularly relevant in service organizations where you have WFM for the contact center but NOT for business operations (sometimes called Back Office).
Show me the sweet spot!
When you move your WFM solution to the cloud, you can easily expand your footprint to cover BOTH the contact center and business operations, giving a shared solution across the entire service organization. This makes it easier to schedule operations work with greater efficiency, and to address looming backlogs. Since the solution is shared, workload can be shared; during slow periods, the business operation can help take calls (and vice versa, the contact center can process claims, loans, etc.)
Is WFM the ONLY solution suitable for a cloud deployment?
Your Workforce Management isn’t the only solution in your contact center or business operation that’s potentially a little bloated. You likely have recording and quality management, and perhaps also performance management, analytics and other applications. You can start a trend with your WFM solution—it can be the first to move.
So, taking WFM to the cloud can be done as a hybrid, maintaining other solutions on premise, but laying the groundwork for them to eventually follow. It’s a great way to get comfortable with the migration path.
To learn more about Hermes UK WFM cloud deployment visit NICE PR page
To learn more about NICE cloud solution, visit NICE cloud web page