In this blog Christina Styers reviews her learnings from years of working in the telecom industry.

As a sales leader in the telecom industry for 20 years, I have had the opportunity to talk to many CIO’s, CTO’s, VPs, Directors, and Support Analysts of Telecom/Telephony Networks about migration projects and how to best manage them and reduce the risk involved.

Migration: every company is doing it

At some point companies using communications tools:

• Migrate from one platform to another
• Move their platform(s) from on-premises to the cloud
• Use multiple vendors of each at the same time and throughout the organization
• Consolidate tools due to a merger or acquisition

With these migration projects executives must evaluate current usage, deal with aging infrastructure, button up their cloud strategies, and keep visibility of user adoption and customer experience. The concern of the risk of downtime can often keep them up at night.

Goals and roles within a business

When talking with these business leaders, I’ve learned there are really three categories of business KPIs and goals that help drive any project, including a migration:

Strategy/Policy – this encompasses the overall direction of a company and the highest level of management of the business.

Tactical/Procedural – this involves breaking down the overall goals of the company into departmental plans and other actionable plans and often involve creating KPIs.

Operations/Execution – this involves breaking down the plans into specific actions, carrying out those actions, and measuring the outcomes on a regular frequency.

Concerns typically fall under these general levels of the business during a migration project:

Executive level – asks for reporting on the number/percentage of users still on the legacy platform and the number of users on both platforms to ensure they are on target for completing the migration on time and within budget.

Middle Management – needs to know which end users are not using the approved headsets or network connections so they can proactively reach out to supervisors for assistance in policy oversight. Is it adoption and the ability to not interrupt day to day activity or customer experience?

Support – must know end users are following guidance for when the end user calls in or submits a support ticket for help with a poor audio issue.

Questions to ask when kicking off migration

No matter your role, you can find reasons and benefits to migrate. It could be to reduce costs, to improve scalability and efficiency, to increase security or to consolidate tools. But, as with any project, there can be challenges and the need for visibility along the way is imperative. During this process stakeholders need access to data to ensure they are on target to achieve their goals. They need their partners and tools to be easy to work with, be multi-platform, forward thinking, agile, and nimble.

Ultimately, those involved in the migration process tend to ask:

1. How do I stay proactive and not reactive during a migration?
2. How do I know the migration is going well for the end users if they don’t provide feedback? If they provide feedback, is it accurate?
3. How can I migrate quietly and quickly?
4. How can I give guidance to users and know if they are following policy?

Let Nectar help

Having been with Nectar for about 6 months, I’ve had the opportunity to talk through this with customers and share where Nectar fits in and can assist in making this easier. We can:

• Help move your contact center call flows from on-prem to cloud, or from one platform to another, quickly and confidently with functional, regression and load testing.
• Ensure agent effectiveness in the contact center infrastructure to avoid ineffective customer interactions.
• Ensure all work-from-home employees are properly managed, visible and are able to communicate effectively with their peers, leadership and customer base regardless of location
• And much more!

I am happy to talk to anyone that may be thinking about migrating platforms or from on-prem to cloud.  Nectar can walk along side and help through the process.  Feel free to drop me a note at cstyers@nectarcorp.com.