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.

2020 has been an incredible year for Microsoft and especially for Microsoft Teams. With many organizations quickly adopting new ways for employees to work from anywhere, Microsoft Teams has seen a meteoric rise in usage for meetings and collaboration. In fact, Microsoft recently announced that by the end of April 2020, usage of Microsoft Teams had surpassed 75 million active users, a massive increase from the 44 million users reported the previous month.

One of the greatest assets of Microsoft Teams is that the platform is growing and adding new capabilities on a seemingly weekly basis. As organizations look for new ways to use the platform and further integrate Teams into their business processes, they will soon discover solutions for customized workflows, business process automation, direct integrations with Microsoft and third-party applications that provide a single pane of glass experience, and even industry vertical-specific functionality for supported tenants.

To help organizations discover some of these capabilities, I compiled a list of four unique use cases that organizations might consider for the next stage in their Microsoft Teams journey.

Contact centers are now increasingly becoming more complex and complicated. With various avenues and roadways to communicate, we must adapt and conform to meet customer expectations.  Multichannel is so two years ago; now it’s omnichannel, which is essentially multichannel, but with one point of aggregation and a system framework.

Gone are the days when a customer calls a company or writes to complain.  They still write, but no longer to the CEO or some other board member of the organization.  They write to social media. Customers still have complaints, like they always have. But their methods and how companies communicate back have changed significantly. …

Yes, just over a decade or so ago, providing world-class customer service meant running a world-class call center.  Then the evolution began.  Voice was no longer the only accessible channel for your customer.  It became email, then chat and then messaging.  As these new channels of communication came about, CALL CENTERS became CONTACT CENTERS.