Rufus Grig: Cloud based solutions

There’s been a huge amount of hype about the use of Cloud technology in the last few years – from the common use of business apps like Salesforce to consumer use of services like Gmail through to sophisticated consumer services like Apple’s iCloud, we are growing increasingly accustomed to the idea that the applications we use may not be sat on our own computers or hardware, or even owned by us, but hosted centrally in a network, and charged to us on a “pay-as-you-use” basis.

Email, CRM – even music and games clearly have their place in “the cloud” – but what does it mean for the contact centre? What does that mean for our interactions with our customers as they increasingly make use of cloud based applications and networking services? What does that mean for our own systems? Are cloud based systems suitable in the contact centre? Are they fast enough, flexible enough, secure enough and reliable enough? Do they save me money or cost me money? And where actually is “the cloud?” – where will my data actually end up?

This session looked at all of these aspects and suggested how contact centre professionals need to respond to the opportunities, challenges and threats caused by this latest computing trend.