Many organizations are shifting their contact centers to the cloud, often as a way to take advantage of the superior security, reliability, flexibility, location independence and real-time updates offered by Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions.

However, as often happens with new technology rollouts, too many companies are skimping on training programs for their employees and managers that can aid in the effective use of the new systems. This oversight is highly likely to create difficulties down the road.

Effective training programs are important not only to smooth the rollout of a CCaaS solution, but also to ensure that companies are positioned to unlock all of the value from their new tools. Without effective training, a cloud contact center can create confusion among agents and managers and leave company leaders in the dark about some of their most important customer data.

The public cloud hasn’t yet become the most popular place to host a customer engagement center — but it will. The shift is inevitable, as the benefits of migrating a customer engagement center to the public cloud are simply too powerful to ignore.

The move can bring many of the same benefits as other cloud migrations, including increased scalability and flexibility as well as the ability to shift from a capital expense (CAPEX) financing model to an operating expense (OPEX) model. Perhaps even more important, a cloud customer engagement center allows organizations to rapidly adopt new services, which get pushed out automatically as vendors update their products. The ability to roll these out as they become available is extremely valuable.

Still, moving to a cloud customer engagement center isn’t a matter of a simple lift and shift. Here are four steps organizations should take to successfully migrate their customer engagement centers to the public cloud.

In the midst of crisis situations, hospitals and healthcare organizations need to be able to communicate important health and safety information to patients in a timely manner — and at scale. During COVID-19, hospitals have scrambled to set up nonessential personnel to work remotely, including call center staff. This has led some hospitals to look for alternative ways to communicate with their communities. Here’s how one CDW customer recently implemented call center automation.

More and more organizations are looking to migrate services to the cloud and toward a more OPEX subscription billing experience — but how does that change affect the contact center? As the contact center technical architect for CDW’s research and development group, I spend much of my time looking at products and determining where they fit within our customers’ spectrum of needs. Cloud Contact Center has been at the forefront of my research and development.

In this series, I am taking a deep dive into several collaboration solutions and how they may fit into your business. Check out my first blog post about RingCentral, and keep reading to learn about our next featured vendor: Five9.

As more companies look to migrate services to the cloud and embrace OPEX subscription billing, how does this relate to the contact center? As the contact center technical architect of CDW’s research and development group, I spend all my time looking at products and where they fit. Cloud contact center has been at the forefront of my more recent research and development. In this blog series, I will take a deep dive into several solutions, their options in the market, and how they may fit into your business.

Video collaboration in the customer engagement center (or contact center) makes sense for many of the same reasons the technology makes sense in other settings: When customers can see a human being on the other end of their conversations, they feel a human connection. When customer service representatives or sales staffers can see the people…