by: Hes Yavari, VP Contact Center & CX Practice

Cloud migration is a strategic move that many companies undertake to enhance their technological agility and improve customer communications. However, the transition from traditional Contact Center platforms to a cloud-based environment can be fraught with challenges. To prevent issues, use these 5 steps to ensure a successful cloud migration, focusing on maintaining, optimizing and ultimately improving customer and agent experiences.

 Baseline of the Customer Journeys Before Migration

When initiating any migration project, it’s crucial to establish a comprehensive baseline of customer journeys and communication channels. Over time, customer journeys often evolve and rely on outdated legacy systems, especially complex IVRs that have undergone numerous consolidations and updates. Without a baseline, distinguishing existing issues from new ones introduced during migration becomes challenging. 

Creating a baseline manually is labor-intensive and time-consuming. For IVRs, this involves making manual calls, navigating through each path, and documenting every customer journey, which can be daunting given the complexity of most IVR systems. Manual documentation efforts may require extensive resources over weeks or months and are prone to errors. 

 A more efficient and accurate approach involves leveraging discovery mapping capabilities within an automated testing solution. This method significantly accelerates the baseline creation process, allowing IVRs to be documented within days instead of weeks or months. The resulting documentation can also be used to automatically generate test scripts, enabling companies to establish baseline documentation and conduct functional and regression testing simultaneously. 

 

Update and Optimize Customer Journeys  

According to a survey from Salesforce in 2023, 80% of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products, so an essential advantage of transitioning to the cloud is the ability to enhance and refine customer journeys and thus customer experience. Form cross-functional teams dedicated to redesigning journeys with a customer-centric approach. These journeys often begin with self-service interactions and may transition to agent-assisted service. Develop these omnichannel journeys based on valuable customer feedback and insights gained from customer experiences. 

 

 

Create Functional Tests to QA Customer Journeys 

Simultaneously develop new or updated functional tests while designing customer journeys. Establish an automated regression test suite to conduct continuous testing during the migration process. Utilize a design-driven testing solution that dynamically generates and maintains tests alongside the design phase. 

Assure New Functionality Performs under stress  

Another crucial aspect of ensuring a successful migration is conducting load testing to verify the performance of your new contact center platform, the associated applications, and your network under various load conditions. Performing a single load test is insufficient; it’s essential to incorporate ongoing load testing into your quality assurance practices. Regular load tests assess continuous system and network performance and evaluate any changes made since the last test.  

Production Proactive and Realtime Monitoring of CX and AX Agents 

 It’s essential to proactively identify any issues with the customer experience before customers encounter them. Implement production monitoring during and after migration to continuously monitor system performance. Given the complexity of modern systems, which involve multiple interconnected components, it’s crucial to ensure monitoring covers all customer journeys, channels, backend system connections, business rules, agent routing, and other critical components. Evaluate attributes such as availability, transaction completion, performance, and other metrics vital to enhancing the overall customer experience. 

Pre-Assessment & Continuous Monitoring – Identifying Connectivity Challenges 

• • Home Users: Identify remote workers with poor internet bandwidth or connectivity. 
  • Testing Cloud Services: Rigorously test bandwidth and performance to cloud services (e.g., AWS, Azure) and corporate data centers. 
  • Eliminate Blind Spots: Ensure complete coverage across all remote workers. 

Post-Deployment Monitoring – Continuous Evaluation 

• • Agent Health: Summarize overall performance using live calls and test results. 
  • Global View: Localize issues to specific users, data centers, regions, or ISPs. 
  • Geolocation Mapping: Understand remote worker locations and ISPs. 

Supported Platforms 

Ensure the solution integrates seamlessly with various platforms, including Genesys, Five9s, Amazon Connect, and more. Make sure the company you work with ensure the product set is futureproof. 

Health Index-Intelligent Routing – Optimizing Agent Availability 

• • User Health Index: Intelligently manage agent availability based on network performance. 
  • Automatic Queue Placement: Place agents in chat queues during performance degradation, switching back to voice queues when network conditions improve. 
  • Manual Adjustments: Allow agents to adapt during voice quality issues. 

 

How Nectar can Help 

According to Forrester research, customers are 2.7 times more likely to spend more when companies communicate clearly. Therefore, it’s important to assure a successful cloud migration with a well-planned strategy that prioritizes customer needs and ensures that their experience is not negatively impacted. By leveraging advanced technologies and methodologies, businesses can enhance operational efficiency and improve customer satisfaction through a seamless migration. Each of these steps are aligned with Nectar’s solutions.  Contact Us!  We’d love the opportunity to discuss your project and concerns with you.