Did we say easy? Whoops! But follow this guide, and it won’t be so bad.

CX leaders are realizing the value of the cloud, from innovative new features to better agent and customer experiences. While getting from on-prem to the cloud (or somewhere in between) is a daunting journey, there are ways to turn it into a turbulence-free first-class flight.

In this quick guide, you’ll learn how the Fortune 1000 are shifting CX to the cloud to build their contact centers, their way.

But before we begin…

Picking your Contact Center platform before you set out on your migration seems like the obvious path forward—just like booking your hotel before jumping on your flight. However, you don’t need to know which CCaaS platform you want just yet—and if you pick the wrong one, your journey might be a little bumpier than anticipated.

To prevent vendor lock-in, leading enterprises are picking their carrier first, then their Contact Center platform. With a platform-agnostic telecom provider, you can move to and around the communications cloud and free your inhibitions (Alexa, play Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen).

Step 1: Unbundle your CCaaS and telecom

Most CCaaS providers allow you to power telephony in two ways:

1. Bundled Telecom: the all-in-one model that often includes per-user pricing plans.
2. Unbundled Telecom: bringing your own carrier for telephony, often with usage-based
   pricing plans.

To bundle, or not to bundle?

Depending on your enterprise’s size and requirements, either could be the right choice.

Bundling

The advantages are pretty straightforward: buy a license and make sure it has the calling plan attached for your users. From there, you’ll receive one point of contact, one bill, and (typically) one flat fee associated with your seat price.

Unbundling

However, for large, complex enterprises, there’s a lot more you can achieve by unbundling with a Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC) solution. In fact, more and more enterprise contact centers are choosing to unbundle. Why, you ask?

When it comes to shifting your contact center to the cloud, it’s always better to be over-prepared and cautious (kind of like getting to the airport 4 hours before takeoff). After all, your revenue depends on it.

Step 2: Audit your current comms stack

Next, analyze your current contact center infrastructure to understand everything that this migration will impact. You have to do this yourself, but your carrier can guide you through and create joint project plans to help you out.

Your infrastructure audit should include:

1. Third-party solutions, like voice biometric authentication, conversational AI, PCI payment processing, interactive voice response (IVR), customer sentiment analysis tools, and more.
2. Your users and phone numbers. This seems obvious, but many enterprises that have grown through mergers & acquisitions have phone numbers all over the place.
3. Documenting your IVR call flows by locating your IVR recordings or making new ones. Then, document those flows so you have everything needed to set up your new cloud platform.
4. Mapping out your network topology to configure emergency address network elements, if needed, such as wireless access points, ports, and switches.

Step 3: Test voice and emergency calling

Test, test, and test again—especially when it comes to your contact center. For your inbound voice, make sure you perform voice testing across inbound, outbound, IVR call flows, holds, transfers, and failovers.

For emergency services, make sure you:

• Test endpoints with Bandwidth’s 933 to cut down on live 911 calls to PSAP
• Test live notifications at the time of each 911 call
• Perform live 911 testing of primary and secondary SBCs
• Notify PSAPs in advance of live testing

At Bandwidth, we set up 933 call routing policies so you can verify location information without performing live 911 testing. And with regulations like Kari’s Law, which requires notifications at the time of 911 calls, and RAY BAUM’s Act, which requires address line 2 information to be included at the time of each call, creating a compliant contact center is complicated.

To learn more about 911 testing, check out our complete 911 testing guide.

Step 4: Initiate your telephony migration

Porting is one of the oldest telecom challenges and can unleash communications chaos
if handled improperly. Disconnected numbers can disrupt customer calls, interrupt
revenue, and create a domino effect of bad news. So what do you do?

Step 4: Design your contact center for success

As an enterprise contact center, you’re almost always looking at a one-to-many or many-to-many migration. You’re not just moving from Avaya to Genesys—you’re also migrating the 15 other third-party solutions to the cloud (or trying to build a hybrid ecosystem).

Now, it’s not enough to just build a contact center. Your customers expect fast, effective support the first time a problem arises, and business decision-makers expect a best-of-breed, cohesive, contact center ecosystem.