Q&A with Forrester Contact Center Analyst Andras Cser

In October 2020, Bandwidth hosted a roundtable featuring contact center analyst Andras Cser of Forrester. The discussion covered industry trends and topics relevant to large call centers, including fraud detection and prevention, network quality's impact on analytics and voice bio authentication, and the increased importance of strong automated authentication strategies due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Following this roundtable, Mr. Cser addressed five key questions about contact center cloud migration: 1. COVID-19 has accelerated the transition of on-prem infrastructure and software to the cloud for large enterprise contact centers. Reasons include increased difficulties in staffing on-prem data centers, customers' shift to digital enrollment processes, and higher fraud rates necessitating improved detection mechanisms available at a lower cost and with greater efficiency via cloud-based solutions. 2. The biggest risks and benefits of transitioning contact centers to the cloud involve maintaining or reducing firms' exposure level to risk while ensuring performance levels such as call hold times, intake volumes, enrollment, and authentication error rates. Benefits include improved security through call monitoring and shared data usage. 3. Contact center platforms that offer easy integration of security, business functionality, and adaptive customer flows have benefited most from the shift to the cloud. Call routing and call security reconfiguration are also key factors in successful transitions. 4. The move away from on-prem has led to a slight reduction or stabilization of contact center staffing due to improved automation processes. This allows firms to rightsize and scale their contact center agents, provide operations at lower costs, and outsource redefined contact center flows more easily. Automated fraud management in call centers also reduces manual labor and shifts resources to value-added tasks. 5. Enterprises rely on their carriers for call routing, analytics, and call flow security during contact center migrations. Carriers' implementation services can help firms implement best practices around these aspects, reducing the time-to-value of cloud contact centers. Additionally, carriers provide valuable consortium data that make protection of call centers more accurate, reliable, and cost-effective.