Cloud Adoption Continues to Grow

Organisations are striving to offer a customer experience that has the flexibility to respond quickly to changing customer demands while controlling costs and remaining competitive.

As cloud adoption rates continue to grow, Aspect Software believes continued cloud adoption in contact centre environments is critical, as businesses cannot afford to be left behind in the face of increased customer expectations for seamless and frictionless engagement with brands.

According to the Cloud Industry Forum’s (CIF) latest research paper, Cloud: Driving Business Transformation, the overall cloud adoption rate in the UK now stands at 88 percent, with 67 percent of users expecting to increase their adoption of cloud services over the coming year. CIF predicts that by 2019, 93 percent of organisations will use at least one cloud service.

The research paper also revealed that by 2020, 70 percent of organisations expect to have adopted cloud for their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications and 57 percent for their customer contact centre.

83 percent of cloud users have successfully improved the reliability of their IT through their use of cloud-based services, 85 percent have increased the speed of access to technology and 17 percent have seen an improvement in their customer engagement.

Chris Streete, Senior Director of Cloud Solutions, EA at Aspect, said: “As the advantages of cloud mature and make themselves clear, businesses are losing their initial fears of security and costs.

“The technology is well established in many customer service environments, because cloud computing has become imperative to elevating contact centres into fully fledged, omnichannel customer engagement centres.

“However, crucially, this is achievable for any size of business looking to establish a modern customer service that meets modern expectations for exceptional experiences.

“Operational benefits of cloud in the contact centre include lower up-front costs, streamlined maintenance and upgrades, and support for integrations between CRM, self-service and contact centres, which drives personalised interactions.”

“To embrace an omnichannel strategy in the customer engagement centre successfully, integration and erasure of silos (such as channels or analytics) is vital,” commented Chris.

Respondents to CIF’s latest research stated that cloud services are successful in furnishing them with a competitive advantage. Almost half (48%) state that using cloud has given their organisation a competitive advantage, and a further 21% expect to see one in future.

“As technology will continue to improve and transform the customer engagement centre, the cloud will enable the flexibility and agility to embrace and adopt new technologies. Similarly, cloud enables organisations to meet the expectations of today’s mobile, connected and highly demanding consumers.”

“Cloud computing is driving innovation, reducing costs, and improving the customer experience so we are seeing a continued increase in adoption rates as businesses are leaving legacy architecture of old call centres behind,” Chris concluded.

Find out more by visiting www.aspect.com