Digital business operations are moving the cloud at an unprecedented rate, and it can be difficult to know exactly how to keep up. A service that wasn’t on the cloud six months ago could easily be the cloud’s hottest new feature — constantly checking to see which of your tasks can go serverless can quickly become a time drain in and of itself.
Transitioning to the cloud is no small task, so you’ll want to bring along as many of your key operations as possible during the leap. Do an inventory of your company’s digital infrastructure and account for everything before assessing how to make the next step.
When figuring out how to make the jump to the cloud, you might ignore some of the less known cloud services being offered today. Here are few to keep in mind:
1. Contact Center
In times like these, businesses need to be completely confident in the capabilities of their customer service. Adopting a cloud-based contact center as a service platform ensures that all of your customer interactions are handled as efficiently as possible without weighing down on your CS representatives.
In addition to efficiently sorting all incoming and outgoing calls, the best contact center as a service (CCaaS) platforms also use enhanced data collection techniques to help your CS team through the process. Five9’s CCaaS solution, for example, includes an On-Screen Caller Info feature that provides whoever picks up the phone with all of the information they need to ensure a successful conversation. CCaaS might not be the norm just yet, but getting onboard now can create big returns later on.
2. Digital Assistant
As your company’s online presence grows, its difficulty to navigate increases in turn. Between project management software, analytics tools, and marketing applications, it can be easy to get lost in your business’s cloud. While this is a problem you could try to overcome on your own, adopting a digital assistant will be far more practical for many.
Digital assistants can aid in integrating all of your different backend applications, but their capabilities don’t just end there: they can act as an intermediary between you and your customers. One of the most popular offerings out there, Oracle’s digital assistant can create collaboration between your employees and your chatbots — making it easier for a real human to take over the conversation during key moments.
3. Text Analysis
The internet is full-to-bursting with customer-created writings, and companies are scrambling for ways to get ahold of it. Users are sharing valuable information more than ever before, but businesses need to know how to extract and process it if they want to use it effectively.
Tools like Microsoft’s cloud-based Text Analytics service can go a long way in streamlining this process. Text analysis apps can take the words in a tweet, Facebook post, or customer survey and identify everything from the keywords to the conversational tone. Businesses moving into new markets might also want to integrate features from a translation tool as well, allowing you to grasp the sentiment of a piece of writing no matter where in the world it came from.
4. Visual Recognition
As companies increasingly beef up their remote capabilities, some of the benefits of in-person contact are starting to be phased out. For businesses that regularly deal with physical goods and services, the inability to address and identify customer issues in person can be incredibly frustrating — thankfully, the cloud is here to help.
One of the first commercially viable platforms of its kind, IBM Watson’s visual recognition capabilities are transforming the way companies do business from a distance. Insurance companies are using it to accurately estimate claim size, marketing companies are using it to see how users respond to certain images, and no shortage of other firms are finding new ways to utilize the platform every day. If you can’t be there yourself, the cloud can help bridge the gap.
5. Blockchain
Blockchain is no longer a niche service for some obscure tech companies: it’s now an enterprise that more businesses than ever need to deal with in order to be successful. Whether it’s for customer payments or secure investing, blockchain is an aspect of business that can’t be ignored anymore.
Amazon Web Services’ blockchain bridges the gap between capability and accessibility, making it easy for businesses of all sizes to get on board. By securing a central ledger database, cloud-centered blockchain operations ensure privacy and resiliency for all of your company’s transactions moving forward — opening up an entirely new market for you to stake your claim in along the way.
The cloud might be an intimidating concept for some leaders, but it’s an inevitable trend all the same. In order to be competitive in 2020 and beyond, your business needs to be able to move dynamically online — shifting some of your operations to the cloud now can help you achieve that goal later.
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via https://www.AiUpNow.com/ by Holly Hutton, Khareem Sudlow
