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Total Administrative Services Corporation (TASC) is among a growing number of organizations that have moved contact center operations to the cloud to take advantage of a wide range of benefits, including the ability to scale up and down easily and reduce upfront and overhead costs in terms of hardware, software and the people required to manage and maintain systems. The trend has only been accelerated by the pandemic, which forced many organizations to enable remote access to systems and data amid a widespread move to work-from-home models.
Cloud adoption is not likely to stop anytime soon, according to destinationCRM. Even before the pandemic, nearly two-thirds of contact center leaders said they intended to adopt cloud technologies in the near term. The cloud-based contact center market was valued at more than $13 billion in 2019, the last year for which data is available, and is expected to reach nearly $45 billion by 2025, according to ReportLinker.
In our recent SnaCX podcast, “Analytics in the Cloud,” we spoke with Gary Hartung, Manager of Operations Support Technology at TASC, the largest privately held third-party benefits administrator in the U.S. Its contact center agents, two-thirds of whom work remotely, handle 1.3 million voice, chat, text and email interactions related to healthcare and other employee benefits.
TASC moved much of the company’s operations to the cloud in order to reduce costs while increasing data security and improving technical support. “The move to the cloud allowed TASC to focus on its core business, leaving support for the applications it uses for interaction analytics, quality and workforce management to NICE,” Hartung says.
The cloud makes it easy for TASC’s agents, whether working at its Wisconsin headquarters or at home, as well as third-party customer support to use the same applications. “That consistency also simplifies training,” Hartung said.
For TASC, communication was critical to the success of the transition.
“One of the things that is key to really having an effective deployment within the cloud is to make sure that everybody is aligned on their goals and objectives and understand that frequent communication and concise communication is very key to being successful,” Hartung said. “Another thing is expectation setting. The end result and conclusion that we had on this whole thing and lessons learned was that the cloud was easier than we thought it would be to actually implement and deploy.”
Looking to the future, Hartung said TASC will only continue to expand the interaction analytics, workforce management, sentiment and quality tools it uses to evolve its customer experience.
“We’re doing kind of the crawl-walk-run,” he said. “We know we want to get to running, but we have a lot of other things going on. We want to work our way toward more of a leading best practice environment. Right now we are just kind of in step two of four, working our way up the ladder.”
Listen to the full podcast here.