Why BFSI Organizations Should Move Their Contact Centers to the Cloud?

How long have you had to wait on hold when you called your bank or insurance provider the last time?

Let’s face it. I am sure you would have waited at least 5 to 20 minutes before you got someone on the phone. This happens to me despite me being a privileged customer of my bank.

Now imagine being on the other side of the problem, trying to manage customer calls with a system that’s slow and expensive and just not cutting it anymore.

Most organizations in the BFSI sector are dealing with these challenges every day.

Besides with the mushrooming of neobanks, digital banks, and challenger banks, the traditional banks have the additional pressure of keeping up with the customer expectations. Your customers want instance service – whether they’re on the phone, chatting online, or messaging you through social media.

Is your contact center built for this kind of flexibility?

I doubt it, and that’s why more and more BFSI organizations are moving their contact centers to the cloud and why you should, too.

It helps you solve a lot of challenges – cutting down response times, bringing in omnichannel capabilities, scalability, seamless integrations with CRM and best-of-breed systems, including social media, and the flexibility for your agents to work from anywhere, anytime.

Compelling Reasons Why You Should Consider Moving Your BFSI Contact Center to the Cloud

1. Anywhere, Anytime Access Across Any Device

Let us assume you have hundreds of customers spread across the country, and they sporadically get in touch with you for some specific reasons. This happens across time zones, and you cannot possibly staff your contact center with agents to address your customer requests 24x7x365.

So, what do you do?

That’s where the cloud helps your organization. Your agents don’t have to be stuck at your office, and instead, they can address queries from the comfort of their homes using any device. All you need is a working browser and decent Internet connectivity for you to help resolve your customer queries.

2. Access to Talent

How often have you missed out on great talents because they aren’t willing to move to the city from where you operate your customer experience function?

With the cloud, you are no longer restricted by location or time zones, and your agents can work from anywhere. This allows you access to the best of talents at all times, and with intelligent routing, your customer calls can be routed to the right agents with the right skills, irrespective of their location.

3. 100% Availability

What happens if your server goes down in your on-premise infrastructure? You would have a backup server to which you would route all the traffic.

How easy is it to route your customer interactions to the new server?

You need to have an IT team with redundancy and failover infrastructure to manage this routing seamlessly. This is probably an event that would happen once or twice a year, and for which you will have to be adequately staffed to ensure that your customers aren’t left without answers.

With the cloud, you are protected against all forms of disasters, and you can add failover and redundant routes at a fraction of the cost you would spend otherwise. Besides, your infrastructure provider will manage all the routing without you having to break a sweat.

This would guarantee 99.9% uptime, tending towards 100%.

4. Omnichannel Capabilities

Imagine you are running your contact center as an on-premise infrastructure, and you want to add social and chatbot channels to it.

Is it impossible to integrate?

Not really, but it would take a lot of effort and time to get these integrations to work and for you to offer omnichannel interactions.

Whereas, most cloud providers have omnichannel built-in with API integrations to add new channels and interfaces easily. Most things in the cloud are configurable, and they come with pre-built integrations with most CRMs and helpdesk software, as well as channels like email, web, voice, chat, chatbots, mobile, and social.

5. Flexible to Scale Your Infrastructure per Your Business Needs

What do you do when you want to add agents to your contact center platform? You will have to buy additional licenses and configure them in your on-premise infrastructure. The provider might ask you for a minimum commitment in terms of licenses and duration.

With the cloud, you can scale up and down your resources at the click of a button. For your spikes, you can add resources immediately, and after the spike, you can scale down the number of agents.

And you pay for only what you use. There aren’t any contracts or minimum commitments from your side.

How efficient would this model be?

6. Lower Overall Costs

Let us look at the on-premise model first.

You will have to pay a hefty license cost and commit to the vendor up front to the number of seats you purchase on different channels. Likely, you may not use everything you buy right from the beginning.

You will also sign an annual maintenance contract to be covered with upgrades, patches, and vulnerability fixes.

You will also have to factor in resources that would ensure the security and availability of your infrastructure. You will have to upgrade your server and voice hardware every three years, as they become obsolete both at the hardware and the software level.

Now, look at the cloud offering. 

There is no CAPEX that you incur. You pay per your use, and you will be billed on a per-minute basis – this includes dialer, voice, integrations, maintenance, upgrades, patches, vulnerability fixes, data security, hosting, customizations, and all the channels.

There is no annual maintenance control, and you don’t need resources to manage and sustain the infrastructure.

Now, a cloud contact center definitely would mean better ROI both in the short-term and the long-term.

7. Security

Let me explain why your data is safer in the cloud than on-premises.

First, most organizations don’t have the financial or technical nous to provide the same security benefits as large cloud service providers can.

Physical security is expensive – do you have guards, mantraps, and locked cages for your servers? Most likely, no. Cloud providers spend the money on round-the-clock guards and state-of-the-art physical security controls. The best part is you don’t have to worry about it.

Technical security – Some of the biggest security breaches happen because of poor patching, and you don’t have full-time teams addressing the vulnerabilities. In contrast, large cloud providers have full-time teams who handle patching round-the-clock for known and unknown vulnerabilities.

Besides, cloud providers have full-time staff monitoring their security operations center round-the-clock against attacks.

Encryption – large cloud providers offer military-grade AES 256 encryption right out of the box, so attackers won’t be able to read any data they might steal. This would require loads of knowledge and high staffing costs in the on-premise environment.

8. Speed of Moving Agents to Work From Home

Let us assume you want to help your agents work from home; it is pretty straightforward to do that with the cloud infrastructure. Your agents will be able to access and work from anywhere, anytime, and with any device.

We are talking about hours here.

When you compare this with conventional contact centers, we are looking at multiple weeks to get the contact center infrastructure up and running. Then, you have the problem of managing hybrid working, which is cumbersome with an on-premise solution.

You will have to create VPN connectivity for every agent to access your on-premise, and it is a bandwidth-intensive solution.

9. Compliance

Compliance is key in the BFSI segment. Imagine being compliant with all the standards and regulations that BFSI demands with your on-premise infrastructure. It is a huge drain on your resources, time-consuming, and cost-prohibitive.

With the cloud, it is effortless as the infrastructure providers are already compliant with most standards and regulations – TCPA and CFPB regulations, PCI-DSS, ISO, NLC, GDPR guidelines, STIR/SHAKEN, and Reg-F, among others.

For a moment, let us forget about the contact center infrastructure and look at the enterprise software segment.

Most software providers have already moved their offerings to the cloud. This is because customers expect the software to be on the cloud, and providers do not have a choice but to move their offerings to the cloud.

Why should contact centers alone be an exception? With all the advantages listed, it makes sense for every BFSI organization to move to the cloud.

I find very little flipside to the move, except perhaps the fact that you have already committed a huge investment to your on-premise offering and want to make the most of it. Else, it is a straightforward choice for you to look at cloud offerings.