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.

Almost no company would roll out a new flagship product to its customers without engaging in extensive market research, aggressive advertising, robust public relations and careful analysis of the product’s performance. It’s puzzling, then, that many organizations roll out new IT solutions to their internal users with little more than a handful of training sessions — if that.

When a business replaces familiar tools and workflows with new technologies, the change requires a culture shift. I’m always surprised when an organization spends millions of dollars on a new tool for their employees but then skips out on adoption services. Sure, an organization may still get basic functionality from its IT with this approach, but it won’t attain the actual goal of rolling out a new solution: to build value for the business.

Here are five steps that every organization should take during a significant IT deployment.

Recent events turned our working lives upside down. With very little notice, millions of people around the world were sent home from their offices to suddenly adopt a remote work lifestyle. Four months into this adventure, most knowledge workers have adapted to working styles that replace conference rooms with video meetings and coffee chats with virtual happy hours.

I believe that we’ve arrived at a new normal where remote work will become a standard arrangement for knowledge workers. Both companies and employees will benefit from this approach. While employees can better balance their lives, companies will be able to reduce overhead expenses by consolidating and eliminating expensive physical offices. This work style comes with new cybersecurity considerations, and I urge organizations to adopt six key practices to adapt to our new working patterns.

As organizations across the country have moved to remote work models, many have reported an increase in cyberattacks. Cybercriminals, it seems, are taking advantage of the public health crisis to exploit security vulnerabilities in home-based computer systems. What can organizations do to minimize the chances that their shift to remote work results in an expensive breach? We recommend a multipronged approach that combines the use of security tools and end-user education.

The global pandemic and social distancing measures have redefined the office for many people. Industries that never would have considered allowing their office employees to work from home were forced to rethink decades of business as usual.

This change has also brought new technology needs. Since these businesses had built technology infrastructures that relied on traditional network and application architecture, a shift had to occur. Suddenly, IT departments were dealing with overloaded VPNs or having to deploy a VPN that they never had to maintain before. Compound that with the fact that users are now accessing company resources from networks or assets that corporate IT has no control over, that most home routers are still vulnerable to exploitation and that, in many cases, the network gates were flung open in the name of productivity ― it’s enough to give any CISO an ulcer.

So how can companies mitigate these risks? Now that everyone is settling into a routine and we’re adjusting to this “new normal,” it’s an ideal time to reach out to your users and talk about security.

Right now, as social distancing keeps everyone away from each other, we need technology more than ever to bring us together. But to be a legitimate part of business continuity plans, that technology must do more than connect us — it needs to simplify our jobs, foster collaboration and increase engagement. Achieving those aims is as much about the users as it is about the technology at hand.

Here are some tips for significantly improving meeting experiences through end-user enablement, marketing and communication, and a service desk adoption strategy.