The benefits of a cloud-based architecture over an on-premises one are easy to prove. Multiple companies in a range of industries, like EMS, Inc., Westpac NZ and Vodafone Germany, are already reaping the rewards of a cloud contact centre. People might feel trapped by the growing costs and maintenance of scaling their on-premises infrastructure to meet new business demands, so the cloud is a good solution for obvious reasons.
Yet, many businesses continue to suffer with an on-premises setup. Often, more people don’t migrate their environment to the cloud — despite knowing its value — because of the perceived pain and expense of the migration process itself. It can feel daunting for a number of reasons. Questions we often get from those interested in moving to the cloud include:
In the first blog in this series, we explained how businesses can transform their capabilities with AI. Genesys has completed hundreds of successful cloud migrations over the past few years — and we’ve developed experience, tools and best practices along the way. In this article, I’ll outline the process in a bit more detail.
Build a Phased Roll-out Plan
Start with an assessment of your current environment using tools to export relevant configuration data. That way, we can create a specific migration journey that will manage risk and align with your business goals.
The resulting migration plan is based on proven use case methodology that’s designed to produce predictable and repeatable outcomes — every time. Each use case encompasses functionality that can be built independently or in combination with other functionality. This allows us to build a phased roll-out plan that gets you started faster. And there’s no need to wait until the entire solution is ready before launching. We’ll start with a set of strategic, core functionality, and then layer in more advanced features in an agile fashion as your employees adopt the new environment incrementally in well-managed releases.
The timeline of your migration plan will be enhanced by tested and proven automation tools. Pieces of the process that traditionally would take weeks to do by hand can be completed in a single day. The technology piece of this is crucial to avoid having to rebuild your new environment from scratch. You can leverage your current customer experience investments to save time and headaches. This is another reason why your first launch date is closer than you might have expected.
Modernize Your Environment
Next, you can begin building your new cloud vision — use case by use case — in a way that’s minimally disruptive to the existing flow of operations. Thanks to automation tooling, key aspects of your intellectual property are transferred and retained from the current solution to the new — quickly. In the cloud, agility is your new superpower; you’ll feel that taking shape during the implementation.
Using the phased approach to migration, we launch a strategic portion of your new cloud solution so you can focus on usage and monitoring that subset of your cloud vision. You might find that, after going into production, you need to make adjustments to fine-tune the solution to hit your goals. That’s much easier to do when you aren’t trying to deal with the whole solution at once. Then you can roll in the next set of capabilities, and the next and the next — until your new cloud vision is complete.
Embrace the Cloud Life
Here’s the best part: Welcome to an agile future of adding and changing your capabilities in ways you couldn’t with your on-premises environment. With the same use-case approach that you used for the implementation, you can launch a proof of concepts, add new channels, and explore the use of bots and other artificial intelligence (AI)-infused technologies — quickly.
The model of large deployments that take several months or even years are exclusive to on-premises solution deployments — they don’t occur in the cloud. To stay competitive, you need to react quickly to the forces of change. That’s where automation tools and a modular deployment methodology become part of your own tool set. Anything is possible now — and that’s an exciting new reality.
We don’t see your journey in the cloud as ever truly “over.” In the cloud, transformation becomes part of how you operate and how your technology vendor should operate, too. If you want to hear more, we’re ready to talk. Email us at consulting@genesys.com with your questions.
The original article was published here on 26th April, 2020.