October 29, 2021 – The sixth Leaders Talk organized by Contact Center Associations of Asia Pacific (CC-APAC) discussed about Cloud Contact Center Strategy by inviting three professional speakers to the Asia Pacific contact center.
This discussion was presented by Andi Anugrah, Chairman of ICCA Indonesia. The first panelist is Vikas Kumar, Solution Director for ASEAN & Strategic Accounts, Nice Ltd. The second panelist is Tommy Ng, Vice President, CCAM, Country Director, MT Microtel Technology Sdn. Bhd. And the last one is Hunady Budihartono, Country Manager, Genesys.
The first topic of discussion is regarding this current situation (pandemic). In this current situation, cloud technology become strategic for the contact center. Vikas said that this time, we have to learn and also unlearn a lot from the past. Because pandemics and lockdown make people change, they could no longer go out, have a face-to-face meeting, and do things like that.
Therefore, this is making a contact center became a kind of front door or first place to go whenever people needed any help or had a question from the business. Some people who never called up, never written email, or never chatted with the contact center, know they are doing that.
People who were already comfortable doing face-to-face sales now had to go and build their contact center to be more scalable, easy to access and make their staff can answer many of those questions. He thinks that where the overall scale, speed, and efficiency that the cloud can provide it because now we can build up that speed sense into what the contact center can offer.
Tommy also shared their opinion about how a manager can utilize the cloud in the contact center. He said that some people think they are not ready for this technology or it’s too dangerous. They also asking, should they do it or not. But Tommy said that the contact center now has no choice. We have to make sure that the user, staff, or employee are safe.
It’s one of the key things that we have to consider before thinking anything else about how do we sustain our business because if we don’t, we will lose all our employees. Therefore, in this situation, we have to adapt technology that where we want is our staff to be safe because they can take care of our business and also our clients.
Tommy also said that remote working is convenient. But, there are two reasons that we have to consider before doing remote work. The first one is infrastructure. The second one is we have to be able to access anywhere. But there are a lot of considerations from the security department to say to allow everybody from anywhere. Therefore, let cloud providers take care of this security issue.
Different from other speakers, Hunady shared his opinion from the operational side. He said that COVID becomes uncertain. When the change going to happen, everybody was working from home and suddenly we have to put more agents at home. Then, that kind of uncertainty becomes the challenge.
Because of that change, now people also don’t want to be face-to-face. They want to make sure that 65% of them can work online. Therefore, that situation pushes everybody to go to the cloud. But before that, we have to think about what kind of cloud we want to do. Then, there is one direction to go and COVID just accelerated the adoption of the cloud.
The other discussion is talked about the benefits of using the cloud in the contact center. Vikas said that there are two key areas of benefit. He said that the first one is machine cloud and the second one is human cloud. Machine cloud is where we get the benefits of scalability. When we talk about cloud, we have a huge capacity which means we can have a data scale, find more patterns, and find more models. Then, the machining cloud will help us to reduce costs and increase speed.
The second one is the human cloud. He said that the human cloud is involved in the millennial style of working. The human cloud is more flexible, can be accessed from anywhere, can be accessed by any type of device, and mobility.
Tommy also has the same opinion regarding this topic. One of the biggest benefits, he said “Of course, is scalability.” Tommy also shared one example. Our government agencies closed all the branches. Then, what can they do? Because they are front desk at their branches. Therefore, with the cloud, we can ask 200 staff from all the branches to log into the system and help us to answer the calls. Then, scalability is one of the benefits.
Hunady has already mentioned before, the benefit of the cloud is flexibility. Flexibility is become the key compared to on-premises uncertainty. It means that when we want to add on our capacity, we must be ready right away at the center. But the other really important thing is time to market. Like when we try to start with a contact center, with all the premises we may need like what, three months four months to be up and running. That’s where Hunady thinks the cloud becomes a key.
At the end of the discussion, all panelists give their closing remarks and tips about cloud contact center strategy. Want to know more about their opinion? For details, stay tuned for another article on the CC-APAC website. (ANF)