Essential Deployment Considerations When Moving to a Cloud Call Center – Part 4: Migration

Over the past several weeks, I have been discussing the key considerations when moving from a premise-based call center to a cloud call center. In the prior weeks, we have looked at Call Quality, Change Management and Training. This week, let’s take a look at Migration.

So, your new system is installed, you’ve ensured your call quality meets your expectations, you’ve got your agents on-board, you are culturally ready for the change and your staff is trained and ready….what’s left?

That final step is to migrate or “port” your phone numbers to the new platform. This is a common function handled by the telecom carriers of the world that involves the numbers being physically migrated from one owner to another. The actual migration takes just a few minutes. So, for those customers that trained in parallel, on the day of the “port”, the old phone stops ringing and the new phone starts ringing.

The process leading up to the port is the actual challenge; it is often an administrative challenge getting the numbers actually cleared for the porting process. The carriers can make this process very difficult since they demand very precise paperwork. Think about it: the carrier is “losing” those numbers so they have a tendency to not be the most supportive…hence the difficult paperwork. This becomes even more challenging for customers that don’t have a good handle on their invoices or have many invoices from multiple suppliers under multiple names. It’s not rocket science, but, it does have the potential to impact the go-live dates.

The last migration item to consider is preserving any information you want from the old phone system before you complete the migration and those items are no longer available. If you have any historical reports that you need for future reference, make sure you pull the data before it’s gone. Think about any custom reporting needs and how you will handle them in the new system. Are there any old voicemails that you need? Will you migrate to the new system on the first day of a new month to keep your data clean? Do you have any Workforce Management changes associated with the new system? Just think ahead with the assumption that all of the old data will be gone to make sure you don’t leave yourself in a bind.

Once you have migrated successfully, you are in the clear. But, there is one more key consideration, which we will look at in next week’s blog entry: Planning for the Unexpected.

About Rich Fox

At Evolve IP, I'm the Contact Center Director, which means I help organizations use cloud technology to provide enterprise class telephony, network, and security solutions. While my experiences vary from IT strategy to technology infrastructure and project management, I have a special talent for call center development. After so many diverse experiences, I can spot an organization that doesn't even know it's a contact center but needs to operate like one. For example, at PHH Mortgage I helped transform the sales division into a contact center. From concepts to workforce management to reporting, this approach helped our teams more effectively answer calls and increase revenue. We saved money just by getting the phone answered by the right person. When I'm not helping call centers optimize their performance, I'm either enjoying time with my family -- I have three kids -- or swimming laps, cycling, and running as I train for my next triathlon.