In single-handed fashion the pandemic has forced many businesses to ditch on-prem technology and ramp up cloud investment. And, as we’ve seen, the transition to effective home working for those blessed with contact-centre-as-a-service solutions has been significantly easier. Most of them moved over in days and went on to successfully cope with huge demand spikes and post record sales figures. Among them were tech companies and retailers offering lockdown necessities online .

Sadly, the virus doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon. This has presented CXOs with new challenges as they get to grips with accelerating digital strategies while adopting radically different business models built around remote working.

Proven case for the cloud

When I speak with our customers, including several contact centre leaders, they seem quite relaxed about home-based agents. At the start of the year, that’s not something I thought I’d ever say. Yet, the reality is employees enjoy not having to make long, stressful commutes and in return are willing to work harder and longer. Of course, they miss the office hubbub but are settling into new ways of interacting. For example, through webchat and video calls.

At Foehn we’re continually helping clients fine tune their Voxivo and Genesys Cloud solutions, so they get the most out of their investments. For example, reducing time to serve through improvements to call flows and IVR menus. Or customising reports so supervisors can jump quickly on bottlenecks or rapidly identify training needs.

And that’s being reflected in key performance indicators such as employee net promoter score, first contact resolution and customer satisfaction, which are holding up well.

Still more work to be done

With pressure to get cloud contact centres up and running as quickly as possible, many IT teams have been left to pick up the pieces when it comes to security and compliance.

Card payments is a good case in point. If your agents need to take payments while working from home, you must ensure your organisation remains compliant with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). To help, Foehn has integrated Agent Pay into both Genesys Cloud and our Voxivo CX platform. The solution already interoperates with 15+ service providers and new ones are being added all the time. You can find out more in our latest whitepaper.

Secure payments are just the tip of the iceberg. The impact of switching from data and apps previously protected through corporate firewalls and sophisticated threat defences to what is often a hard-to-control BYOD (bring your own device) setting runs a lot deeper.

Closing security loopholes and vulnerabilities

Home working has created a whole new set of challenges. The situation’s been compounded by panic buying of non-compliant laptops and inferior VPN products that simply aren’t up to dragging large amounts of data across home internet connections shared by more than one person.

Data leakage is one of the biggest concerns. Hackers and cybercriminals are stepping up activity. They know IT teams have their hands full dealing with increased helpdesk traffic. So, routine tasks like anti-virus updates and software patches can get missed, leaving back door vulnerabilities.

In response, companies are turning to security information and event management (SIEM) tools that aggregate and analyse data from multiple systems to catch abnormal behaviour or potential attacks. However, the software’s not cheap. A good way to lower and spread costs is to consume SIEM as part of a wider-ranging managed service that includes mobile device and application management solutions like Microsoft Intune and Autopilot.

Through our Kerv Group sister company Metaphor IT we can arrange security assessments to ensure your business and home workers stay protected and don’t suffer downtime.

So, if you need help with your cloud contact centre or IT security please get in touch.