Majority of contact centres to migrate to Cloud in 2013

This year will see the majority of contact centres operating their operations in the Cloud, according to new research.  

The survey of 500 UK contact centre directors and senior managers by Interactive Intelligence found a quarter of firms already use the Cloud in their operations. Additionally, the research revealed a further 48% claimed they are actively looking or would like to move to Cloud in the next 12 months.

Business managers cited a reduction in capital expenditure as the main reason they intend to move to the Cloud (45%), followed by the belief that a Cloud-based system would aim their company’s growth (37%) and Cloud computing’s ability to bring faster deployment in their contact centres (28%).

However, despite these intentions, the research also showed that more than 50% of UK call centres still don’t fully operate Cloud. According to the survey, the biggest obstacles were shown to be data security (43%), concern about lack of onsite support (23%) and the belief that customers’ negative perceptions of ‘outsourced’ call centres (24%).

Dave Paulding from Interactive Intelligence, said: “The results demonstrate how perceptions have changed since cloud solutions were first introduced to the industry. There are still some perceived concerns around security, but as the findings show, an increasing number of contact centres are looking to deploy cloud-based models and we are seeing this growth in most industry sectors.

“Interestingly, since the 2010 research findings, there is now a greater demand and uptake for cloud-based contact centres in the financial services sector, closely followed by the retail sector.