Not so long ago, contact centers existed in a single building, where all agents sat, operations worked, and data centers whirred away. The on-premises, legacy architecture was limiting: basic features such as interactive voice response (IVR) were not sophisticated, with very few calls handled in self-service. Little to no customer information would get to the agent when a customer was routed to them, forcing the customer to repeat themselves. This led to an obvious outcome: disjointed, impersonal, deeply frustrating customer experiences.

Today, many businesses are migrating contact centers to the cloud, and the allure is clear. It is much easier to add new services, capacity, and agents, allowing for nimble responses to business needs. You can quickly scale up and down as everything can be done virtually. Updates to services and adding new capabilities happen seamlessly through the cloud as well. Agents can now work remotely and come online quickly, needing only a computer with access to the internet.