While the CCaaS providers want you to think that everyone is fleeing to the cloud and the traditional on premise CC providers want you to think that the shift is very slow, the truth is somewhere in the middle. One thing we can be sure of is that all of our on premise customers are doing this:

Every vendor is playing defend and take over. The days of an Avaya IVR with a Cisco ACD are starting to go the way of the dinosaur. Really no one is interested in playing reach out and integrate, but this is where the most value is present and where I think we, as consultants, should be focusing our energy. Let’s look at a couple of scenarios where reach out and integrate make sense.

Scenario 1: You’re on an old ACD which, while still supported, your only upgrade path is to go cloud as the vendor has stopped on-premise development. You are not sold on going cloud and are considering replacing your current platform with another on premise solution.

Scenario 2: There is a worldwide state of emergency, let’s pretend a pandemic is happening, and you need to spin up small clusters of call centers quickly to handle increased demand due to new customer requests. You’re projecting that these call centers and agents might only be online for a maximum of a year so you want to avoid having to purchase perpetual licenses and new hardware to handle these new capacity long term.

Scenario 3: Business is absolutely booming and the two server solution you love has reached capacity. The only way to scale is to go to a completely different solution, but you absolutely love your current system and you don’t have enough data to make a decision to replace your system or not.

We are seeing a lot of requests coming in which fit the above 3 scenarios and we have spent a lot of time figuring out what the perfect reach out and extend strategy is for each request.  I would love to hear what other scenarios or interesting pairing others have run into or are currently working on. I’ll be posting more about one interested pairing we’ve made and the solution we’ve developed to increase the life of our customer’s call center.

~david