As the role of technology continues to evolve and impact organizations across industries, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) like yourself are facing an array of challenges in the ever-changing landscape of digital transformation.
Available strategies to address your key IT challenges are often limiting to your overall enterprise. Worse, outdated tools and systems can result in complex configurations, disjointed management, and expensive bills.
In this blog, we’ll dive into the top five challenges that enterprise CIOs are currently facing, and methods CIOs could use to solve each challenge.
1. Accelerating cloud migrations
Moving to the cloud has been a hot topic for many years, but it’s still out of reach for many organizations and top of mind for most IT leaders. A 2023 study by Metrigy found that 72% of companies are in, or planning to move to, a cloud contact center.
Why? There are many moving pieces, and a lot can go wrong. The challenge lies in migrating from on-premise to a full range of hybrid and cloud solutions, all while keeping your critical communications up and running.
To solve this, you need a solution that offers a clear migration path and well-defined steps for a seamless transition to the cloud. They should also consider adopting a hybrid cloud approach to move workloads between on-premise and cloud environments as needed.
2. Bolstering resiliency and business continuity
Moving to cloud-based solutions is often associated with losing direct control over resiliency, security, and disaster recovery. For many IT leaders, the challenge now is how they will increase resiliency and truly own disaster recovery in what we might coin, a post-on-prem world.
For a truly resilient communications ecosystem, look for solutions with multiple layers of redundancy. This might look like the ability to enable disaster recovery and failover scenarios automatically, so organizations don’t have to port out loads of phone numbers and navigate fire drills. Or, you could adopt a cloud-native solution with built-in disaster recovery capabilities and ensure high availability of critical services.
3. Rolling out new platforms and AI capabilities
CIOs are also faced with rolling out new platforms and AI capabilities. In fact, Talkdesk found that 79% of CX leaders plan to increase investment in contact center AI and automation in 2023.
Customer experience (CX) leaders plan to increase investment in contact center AI and automation in 2023. The challenge for CIOs? There’s no common player between UCaaS, CCaaS, and AI GartnerⓇ Magic QuadrantⓇ Leaders that can truly deliver a best-in-class solution from one source. This means that achieving interoperability requires lots of time, resources, and, usually, a system integrator.
CIOs should look for solutions that can ease the process of achieving interoperability, and offer a unified approach to managing different platforms and AI capabilities. They should also consider solutions that offer easy integration with your existing tech stack and can be easily customized to meet specific business needs–like placement in your contact center’s call flow.
4. Optimize call costs and operational efficiencies
PwC’s 26th annual Global CEO Survey found that 85% of CEOs report reducing operating costs to mitigate against potential economic challenges.
As we enter an economic downturn, you’re likely feeling similar pressure to cut costs. Often, you can do this by optimizing communications spend with efficient call routing at the carrier-level—before ever hitting an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) or CCaaS platform.
To cut costs, look for solutions that offer optimized call routing, provide real-time analytics and insights, and enable you to quickly adjust routing rules. Also consider adopting solutions with automation and AI-powered insights that can help identify areas for improvement.
5. Managing communications globally
According to ~1,000 IT leaders around the world, 95% of enterprises find managing their telecom systems to be extremely, very, or moderately challenging.
Managing global communications can be costly and stressful, especially as enterprises grow organically (or inorganically) via mergers & acquisitions (M&A).
To scale up, look for a solution or partner that can offer a unified approach to global communications management. Also, consider solutions with a centralized management portal, real-time analytics, and reporting that enable them to manage and optimize global communications from a single platform.
Get on the path to simplicity
If you’ve made it this far, you know CIOs are up against a diverse—and evolving—set of challenges, and the solutions required to solve them are equally varied.
To succeed in today’s climate, enterprises must execute a strategy that allows you to bring in best-in-class tools across unified communications, cloud contact center, and artificial intelligence (AI) platforms–in one place. This will give you a faster time to value and enhance customer and employee experiences to make your mark on internal and external collaboration.
