The Rush to Cloud-Based CX Platforms: Are Businesses Moving Too Fast?

Customer Experience (CX) leaders everywhere are wrestling with the same question:

“How do we move our contact center to the cloud and do it right?”

We’ve all heard the promises of flexibility, scalability, and lower costs. How often have we seen businesses move to the cloud without planning, which has caused more headaches than it solves?

In this article, we’ll follow a real-world use case of a mid-sized financial services firm and see how they went about migrating to a cloud-based customer experience  platform.

You’ll learn everything related to migrating right to an advanced cloud contact center  platform from this use case.

Use case: Mid-sized financial services firm

Step 1: Recognizing the need

The financial services firm has been running an on-premise contact center for over a decade. They were living with the following challenges:

• Phone, email, and chat operated in silos without any integration.
• Adding additional agents meant buying additional licenses, increasing the server capacity, and depending on the IT staff’s expertise.
• Very little choice for agents to log in from home, even during the pandemic. The only option available was the expensive VPN connectivity, but that didn’t work either because of high bandwidth requirements.

They understood that their costs were becoming huge without any flexibility or scalability. So they decided to move to the cloud, lest they’d remain reactive and behind the curve.

However, they didn’t want to rush the migration, and they decided to work through a plan in a phased manner.

Step 2: Building the migration plan

They gathered all the stakeholders (IT, Finance, Quality, senior agents) to map out the migration plan. They defined the following.

Objectives

• Cut infrastructure costs by 30% in Year 1.
• Enable 100% of agents to work remotely within 60 days.
• Reduce average hold times by 20% using advanced call routing and analytics.

Phased rollout

• Phase 1 (Voice & IVR): Move inbound/outbound voice and IVR first.
• Phase 2 (Omnichannel): Integration of all the customer service channels
• Phase 3 (Analytics & AI): Roll out real-time analytics, dashboards, and chatbots.

Key requirements

• The platform needs to be tightly integrated with their Salesforce CRM
• PCI-DSS compliance as they were handling payment data
• An intuitive and user-friendly interface that would require minimal training

With this migration plan, they could easily validate every step and improvise to ensure the success of cloud migration.

Step 3: Selecting the right platform provider

They evaluated several cloud platform providers and understood that most of them are just legacy systems hosted in a data center. They weren’t providing the necessary flexibility, scalability, or integration capabilities.

They wanted the vendor to fulfill the following needs:

• A truly multi-tenant architecture that would allow them to scale easily and support automated updates.
• Pay-as-you-go model with no contractual commitments or minimum guarantees
• Pre-built integration with Salesforce and API integration capabilities with other IT systems
• PCI-DSS compliance and redaction capabilities

ClearTouch’s platform satisfied all their needs, and they decided to go with ClearTouch for their cloud migration needs.

Step 4: Phase 1 – Voice and IVR implementation

As a first step, they ensured firewalls and internet bandwidth could handle SIP traffic.

Then ClearTouch’s Salesforce connector was set up so that incoming calls automatically pulled up all the caller’s records from the CRM instantly.

They ran a pilot through which agents logged into the platform from their respective homes and tested calls.

Through this entire process, ClearTouch support was available to troubleshoot and handhold the financial services agents in using the platform efficiently and optimally.

Within 48 hours, their team saw:

• A 15% reduction in hold times, thanks to intelligent call distribution.
• Twenty agents working remotely with no technical glitches.
• A 25% cost savings that first month, moving from annual maintenance fees to per-minute usage.

Step 5: Phase 2 – Adding omnichannel capabilities

They mapped the customer journeys to ensure that all customer interactions were seamless and productive.

They first defined the flow of customer interaction.

Here’s how they defined it. All website chat goes to self-service channels like chatbots, FAQs, and a knowledge base. Anything nuanced or complex is directly routed to human agents. At any point during the interaction with the chatbots, customers are provided with an option to transition to live agents seamlessly.

All their agents were trained in using ClearTouch’s omnichannel console with color-coded tabs for different channels.

They configured the platform’s BI to display live call counts, average wait times, and email backlogs in their dashboards.

With omnichannel capabilities and reporting, the CSAT scores rose by 12%, and they were able to manage more interactions without adding additional seats.

Step 6: Phase 3 – Analytics and advanced capabilities

With the basics in place, they decided to focus on data-driven improvements.

Voice analytics

ClearTouch’s voice analytics solution can help you understand the negative sentiment of the customers, and it can flag an irritated, stressed, or plain disappointed customer. Besides, it can help identify compliance issues, misselling, agents’ training needs, and privacy issues.

Workforce Management (WFM)

Based on historical data and real-time variations, ClearTouch’s WFM can forecast, schedule, and manage intraday effectively. It will ensure that the right number of agents with the right skills are available to address customer queries.

By the end of Phase 3, the center was a modern, data-driven operation.

They achieved:

• A 20% reduction in average handle time.
• A 30% increase in first-contact resolution.
• A 40% lift in agent satisfaction.

How ClearTouch made a difference

The financial services firm’s success wasn’t luck; it was the result of partnering with a truly cloud-native provider.

True cloud-native architecture

ClearTouch has high availability and auto-scaling into its foundation, so holiday rushes or traffic spikes never break the system.

Transparent, per-minute pricing

They paid only for the actual minutes used; there were no surprise bills. Cost predictability made their finance team breathe easier.

No dependency on internal IT

As a cloud platform provider, ClearTouch handled all platform maintenance, upgrades, and security patches. Their IT team didn’t have to get involved in the CX operations.

Seamless integrations

Pre-built integration with Salesforce and API capabilities ensured that all the systems were integrated to offer a single view of all customer interactions across interfaces to agents.

Expert support

ClearTouch handheld the customer through the implementation to ensure their success. Besides, our availability 24/7 via email, chat, and voice ensured that the financial service firm did not have to go through any surprises.

Compliance

ClearTouch’s platform was compliant with PCI-DSS and supported PCI redaction.

ClearTouch ensured that the implementation stayed on schedule and within budget while ensuring that every requirement was met.

Here is the blueprint to get your cloud migration right.

Plan deliberately: Set clear objectives, map integrations, and roll out in phases.

Invest in your people: Train agents, secure buy-in, and use change management.

Secure your data: Verify compliance, encryption, and backups.

Choose a true cloud-native partner: One with transparent pricing, built-in integrations, and expert support.

Above all, choose a partner who will be with you at every step.