Hitting Out of the Park with Cloud CommunicationsHitting Out of the Park with Cloud Communications

As companies seek out ways to improve communications and collaboration for employees and their contact centers, they are increasingly turning to cloud platforms. As shared during the Enterprise Connect Virtual event, Communications & Collaboration: 2024, here are three quick examples.

OneLegal – Last summer, this digital litigation support service tapped Dialpad’s cloud communications platform to replace its on-premises call center system and expand beyond voice to include support for email and chat channels. In addition, OneLegal is taking advantage of the tight integration of Salesforce, which is uses for its ticketing system, Fernan Elacio Kalaw, director of customer support, OneLegal, said during an Enterprise Connect Virtual session (register for free on-demand viewing). Dialpad “made it easy for us to [integrate] so we don’t have multiple screens open… we’re trying to eliminate a lot of the unnecessary steps and clicks to make sure employees have the best experience while supporting customers,” he said. And for Kalaw, who said he is using to have to pull data from multiple sources, the Dialpad platform “is like Candyland,” he said. “It is so refreshing to see that everything is all showing in the display, in one place… you’ve got a heatmap, the agent status, different analytics that is either historical or real-time… I mean what else could you ask for?”

Kansas City Royals – Last March, ahead of the baseball season and a previously planned schedule, the Kansas City Royals decided to move forward with a migration from on-premises calling systems to an integrated cloud communications platform from 8x8. The goal was to be able to support everybody working from wherever they were at any given time, Brian Himstedt, senior director of technology for this Major League Baseball franchise, shared during another Enterprise Connect Virtual session. The “everybody” in the Royals’s case includes business users and remote call center agents who primarily sell premium and group tickets, he said.

With 8x8’s voice platform, employees are leveraging chat and other collaboration tools at a more rapid pace of adoption “than I’ve seen in my entire time here,” Himstedt said. Additionally, supervisors and managers have been “excited to take advantage of” quality management, performance management, and speech analytics capabilities available with the platform. They’re able to pick up valuable, deal-closing conversations that contact center agents are having with customers, pulling out snippets, and then making those best practices or most successful sales tactics readily available for the rest of the group, he said.

That its users are taking ownership of these new technologies is just what IT had been asking for, Himstedt said. “We've asked to matter, we've asked to be invaluable, we've asked to help drive change. Our role now is to continue to demonstrate the value beyond the initial value.”

Condé Nast – With 6,000 employees in 20 countries across the globe, this 100-year-old media company is in the process of centralizing communications on the 8x8 cloud platform, Craig Holland, SVP of digital technology at Condé Nast, shared during the same session. Condé Nast considers itself a technology-forward company, but has offices in many cities that have ancient phone systems and have yet to adapt to today’s world. Having a cloud UC platform has “ been a huge help during the pandemic, since people have been able to go home and talk to each other on the same platform,” he said. “We abandoned legacy systems, like [our Microsoft] Exchange servers, things of that nature, and went into a best-of-breed setup where we essentially said, ‘OK, if we're going to have chat, if we're going to have video, we have all these different communication methods. Let's get the best ones, and let's get the ones that fit our culture,’” Holland added.

In addition, since consolidating on the 8x8 platform, Condé Nast has been able to extend its service desk/contact center operation beyond the U.S. to India, and now runs a 24/7 global operation, Holland said.

While Holland said he has no tangible way to measure the impact of communications and collaboration on Condé Nast, he did have some advice to share. To him, these “cool tools” provide the best opportunity for driving culture. “Take them seriously,” he advised, “and sort of create the virtual experience that you want your people to have.”