All CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) providers are focused now on moving their existing clients from on premise to cloud-based platforms. Providers such as Genesys no longer offer an on premise option for new customers – all new customers are set up in the cloud. Over time, the support offered for on premise solutions will decline and eventually all contact center solutions will be offered as cloud only.
Consequently we’re talking to many of our existing clients about what they need to be mindful of when considering a migration to a cloud-hosted contact center solution and how CardEasy can support this transition.
When you’re making this move your contact center provider may tell you that they have their own secure payment solution that you could utilize in the cloud. But it’s important to understand that what you’re being offered here is not a like-for-like substitute for CardEasy, as these solutions often require the agent to transfer the customer to a self-service IVR for payment.
The IVR payment solutions offered by CCaaS providers do not compare with CardEasy in terms of features and benefits. CCaaS providers promote their own solutions normally because they are free of charge, but they offer a poor customer experience. Those solutions that require the customer to be transferred to IVR for payment suffer from not only a poor customer experience but also high levels of abandoned payments as the agent is no longer available to assist if anything goes wrong or the customer has any problems at all (for example the customer struggles with the IVR prompts, or the payment fails for any reason).
In this scenario the customer is no longer in contact with the agent to whom they were originally speaking so they would generally need to hang up and then call in again, starting the whole process again. This is a terrible customer experience and leads to higher call handling times and much higher rates of call abandonment and payments not being completed. The only way around this would be for the agent to remain on hold throughout the time that the customer is paying in the IVR so that they can be on hand if the customer has a problem. This would obviously be hugely inefficient and significantly increase your average call handling times while also tying up the agent who is then unable to assist other customers.
CardEasy can easily support your transition to a CCaaS platform as it offers both on premise and cloud solutions and the switch from one to the other is relatively straightforward. If you’re moving your overall contact center operation from on premise to the cloud there’s no reason why your CardEasy service should be interrupted at all. In fact you can run both an on premise and cloud-based CardEasy solution in parallel.
When you’re transitioning to the cloud there are three core areas that you need to consider: the telephony (meaning the routing of the calls themselves), the agents’ desktop environments and the payment or tokenization gateway. When you switch from CardEasy on premise to cloud, only the telephony needs to be reworked. Everything else stays exactly the same. There is no change to the desktop environment that your agents are used to, or the payment gateways. All the integrations that you have set up, for example with your CRM system, remain untouched. If you’re happy with the CardEasy solution then we just need to change the telephony from using our hardware to our cloud solution. It’s a very simple change to make. The chances are that you’ve invested a significant amount of time and effort into deploying the CardEasy solution, in terms of agent training, establishing use amongst your customers, integrating it with your existing solutions and much else. There’s no need to lose any of that when you move your contact center solution to the cloud.
However there are some key decisions to be made when you move to the cloud, and the earlier you can involve us in your discussions, the simpler the transition will be. A provider like Genesys, for example, has two cloud offerings. Either you can port all your numbers to Genesys (they effectively become your carrier) or you can ‘bring your own carrier’ which means you can pick your own telco provider and have that telco deliver calls to Genesys in AWS.
This is an important decision. If you opt for porting your numbers to Genesys then CardEasy is effectively locked out of the call path. Genesys becomes your telco and there is no way for CardEasy to intercept the calls before they connect. At that point you’re then completely dependent on Genesys’s own IVR payment solution. If, however, you opt for the ‘bring your own carrier’ option then you’re able to continue using CardEasy and migrate to our cloud. Your chosen telco will deliver calls to CardEasy which will then flow down to Genesys. Often people don’t realize what a critical decision this is – that if you let your CCaaS provider become your telco provider that you’re then massively limiting your ability to access third-party solutions such as CardEasy.
If you’re already using CardEasy and you’re starting to think about moving your contact center operations to the cloud then give us a call so we can talk about how to do this seamlessly without any interruption to your existing CardEasy service.
