The three essentials to optimising your cloud voice transformation

Nearly every organisation I speak to openly admits that the digital transformation journey they thought they had in place has now been thrown completely off track.

In the effort to rapidly accommodate hybrid remote workers, organisations effectively placed an extended pause on their voice transformation plan. This pause not only disrupted operational plans, but also created expensive scenarios where organisations had to pay for dual licenses - one for their legacy hardware voice solution and one, or more, for their remote collaboration tools. Optimising these environments and successfully completing their cloud voice transformation journey is critical for both operational efficiency and flexibility, but also for realising the financial benefits of cloud consumption services.

Unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution and successful transformation can be a complex process, particularly for large global organisations. Misconceptions that it’s straightforward can lead to a false sense of security and adoption of a DIY approach, loaded with increased risk. Without an experienced partner, it’s easy to run into challenges around global voice regulatory requirements, reaching forecasted cost efficiencies or ensuring a quality unified experience.

Based on my experience working with organisations of all sizes and geographically dispersed offices, there are three key areas to consider when planning how to move your voice to the cloud: 

How can you optimise user experience?

Delivering a high-quality user experience is more of a challenge now that hybrid working is here for the foreseeable future. You can’t prioritise one user type over another anymore, because a user could be having a critical interaction with a customer from anywhere and on any device. User experience has to be location and device agnostic, and truly end-to-end, extending beyond the user in most cases and all the way to the end customer. Ensuring that you are delivering the optimum Quality of Experience (QoE) to your customers is critical as it can affect your overall brand image either positively or negatively. 

How can you help users get the most out of the tools you provide?

Some organisations are making the mistake of thinking they’re too far down their voice transformation road for user adoption to be important anymore. When many businesses shifted overnight to working from home their users had to find their own way around the collaboration tools they were given, so any user adoption programme went out the window. Why would they need to provide support now? Reviewing how your people are using your cloud-based tools is a really smart move. You’ll find out if they’re using them properly and can then boost effectiveness, productivity and user experience. And effective use will boost your return on investment, too.

Getting rid of your PBX and yearly maintenance costs for good?

In the scramble to adopt cloud meetings solutions to enable working from home, many organisations have ended up keeping their PBX, alongside running voice services in the cloud. In my opinion, this is a missed opportunity to build flexibility and scalability into your business, at the same time as realise increased savings with minimum operational impact. It’s understandable to have kept the PBX going in case of a full return to office-based working, but that thinking has moved on, and it’s time your cloud services stepped up to support your users wherever they are. The question isn’t ‘how do I replicate what’s on my PBX in the cloud?’, but ‘how can I reimagine my voice services?’. I’m working with customers who are finding they can eliminate over 40% of their current PSTN spend by using cloud-based consumable services. They reduce their dependence on fixed telephony devices and only pay for what they use. This helps them not only deliver a single platform, full enterprise grade voice service anywhere in the world but also become more sustainable in their business practices. 

Transform your voice services with One Cloud Microsoft Teams

Prepare your company for the future by completing the move to cloud voice with BT One Cloud Microsoft Teams. We can put voice where you need it, with calling in Teams across 180+ countries, in some of the most challenging, regulated and distant locations. To find out more about how you can take full advantage of Microsoft Teams, visit our webpage.