Mar 13 2017 Moving Your IVR TO The Cloud? Here Are 6 “Free” Tips To Help You Get Started
“Let’s just move the IVR to the cloud!” Your boss, CFO, CIO and everybody else seems to be saying it. And you agree. (All of you have probably read Chad’s blog on CapEx vs. OpEx.) Moving to the cloud gets you the redundancy and capacity you’re no doubt looking for, in addition to helping you focus on your business.
That all sounds great, but what comes next is the hard part, actually doing it.
Because making this jump to the cloud is more challenging than you might think, I thought I would share some “free” tips I’ve learned while helping some of our clients through this very process. Granted, I am not the guy who is going to be writing How to Move Your IVR to the Cloud for Dummies book anytime soon. But hopefully these tips will help you avoid some of the common pitfalls I see on a repeated basis.
Know Everything Your IVR Really Does
It amazes me how often we find ourselves migrating an IVR system, only to find out the old system performs functions the client didn’t divulge to us or even know themselves. And of course, these “surprises” are typically not discovered until very late in the game. Sometimes even after go-live, which not only impacts the project, but also the business. This goes beyond just knowing all of the functions within the IVR applications, as often premise IVRs have had call routing or even voicemail applications developed in them, rather than in the PBX.
Tip No. 1: Go through your ACD/PBX and get a list of all phone numbers that go to the IVR and then determine what each of them does. (You’ll need this list for cut-over/migration anyway.)
Identify All of the Integration Points
Cloud migrations (not just IVR) are often delayed when it turns out the cloud platform does not have access to all of different systems and information it needs.
Tip No. 2: Bring in your network and security team(s) early to work through the cloud configurations to access your on-site systems. These always have long lead times and lots of paperwork.
Another common issue I find is that often the premise IVR is reading a local file (maybe a nightly import) or writing to one with results. You do not want your cloud IVR doing this, and I’m sure those nice security folks who just helped you out with your cloud configurations will tell you this in the politest possible way. These integrations really need to be re-implemented with the cloud in mind, and that likely means Web services.
Tip No. 3: There is often a Web service interface available to use now that was not available back when the old IVR was developed. Ask the Web UI team, they will be happy to see it get re-used. This will allow a cleaner Cloud to Premise system integration.
Know the Impacts of Cloud Telephony
Cloud telephony is probably different than what you have today. If your IVR and agents are behind the same switch today, then when a call is transferred the switch just moves it from the IVR to the agent. In the cloud, however, it’s a different story.
The call will likely be “bridged” from the IVR platform to your premise switch. The good news is this frees your switch from supporting the IVR calls, but you will have costs for calls even after the IVR is done with them.
Tip No. 4: Get IVR and agent call volume and call length data from your existing system. Calculate the full cloud costs of your calls, so you (and you CFO) are not surprised.
Now that you are using cloud telephony, how will you keep your screen pops? This is another integration point that is too often overlooked.
Tip No. 5: Include a cloud-to-premise CTI component in your solution. Getting the already captured data to the agent desktop is always critical to the customer experience and efficiency.
Have Reports and the Right Ones
Once you turn on the cloud IVR, you’re done, right? But how do you know what it is doing? Not only is it working, but is it working well?
While IVR application reporting is a subject all to itself, any IVR migration needs to consider reporting. Many clients are still using the ACD reporting to look at IVR call information. At a minimum you need to determine what reports are being used and make sure that they are either provided by the cloud platform or by the migrated application.
Tip No. 6: Take advantage of the IVR Cloud migration to add business reporting to your applications. This is the reporting that has the most value and will enable you to make better decisions going forward.
Final Thought
Because every organization is different, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that will work with your migration to the cloud. That said, there are some best practices you should be following. And, more importantly, you should take note of the common theme at the heart of the tips I’ve provided today: With careful planning and a comprehensive approach that includes research and involvement from multiple teams, you’ll have a better time sidestepping some of the common issues we’ve seen with our own clients.