October 29, 2021 – Interactive discussion initiated by Contact Center Associations of Asia Pacific (CC-APAC), Leaders Talk: Cloud Contact Center Strategy, which invited three professional speakers in the Asia Pacific contact center.
One of the speakers who was invited to this discussion is Vikas Kumar. He is Solution Director for ASEAN & Strategic Accounts, Nice Ltd. In this discussion, Vikas explains 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.
Vikas also shared the benefits of using the cloud in the contact center. He said that there are two key areas of benefit. He said that the first one is a machine cloud and the second one is a 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.
Vikas Kumar also gives a closing remark and his tips about today’s discussion. He thinks that the first one is we should be open about this. The service providers or vendors with technology providers have to be very open about what they can do and what they cannot do.
The most purpose of doing things differently is that we want to make a change to our business. Then, it can make something that is different.
Sometimes some things will have to change both on the people side. A lot of IT teams have been very comfortable taking care of a particular platform. But on the other side, there is an IT team that understands where the technology is going and they are ready to acknowledge it. Also, they are very open to getting retrained to learn new things.
The last thing is he said that we have to prepare for the pitfalls. If there are any changes, which is that you want? Put back or keep a plan to be ready. He thinks that when you migrate, make sure that you have the right backups you have the right plan in place. At least in the short term, you will have a fallback option. (ANF)