Of the 80% of contact centers who have migrated or are planning to migrate to the cloud half of them will fail[1]. Despite heavy investment in cloud technology organizations are realizing a smaller return on their cloud investment than expected and a large proportion of initiatives are failing all together.
This post is the second in a series of blog posts on the reasons why cloud migrations fail and the strategies for mitigating the risk.
The rapid evolution of the cloud means organizations can accelerate innovation, enhance cybersecurity, scale dynamically and redeploy big chunks of IT budget from low-value work to higher value customer facing initiatives. It’s understandable then, that organizations want to migrate as quickly as possible.
The problem with migrating too quickly is that it can cause major issues further down the line and actually end up taking more time and costing more money.
Taking a staged approach to cloud migration is key.
By doing a cloud migration in phases and prioritizing the order in which you migrate the differing areas of the contact center means that any mistakes made occur on a small scale, the later migration phases can be optimized, and costs and timings can be managed correctly.
Taking a slower approach can be the difference between migration success or migration failure:
- Start by evaluating every part of the organization to determine the big risks and develop mitigation and recovery plans early in case something goes wrong;
- Prioritize the initiatives that will bring the biggest benefit to the organization in as short a time as possible;
- Assign a cost to each phase of the migration (instead of the entire project) to better track the return on investment;
- Put realistic timelines against each phase of the migration. Don’t try and frontload it at the beginning. Start small, learn from mistakes and build up momentum as you get into the swing of it.
To read more about the reasons why cloud migrations fail and learn about other coping strategies read 4 ways to avoid a cloud migration failure.
[1] IDC & Genesys, Infopulse
