Follow these three stages to ensure a seamless migration to cloud communications.
Stage 1: Audit current situation
Before migrating to UCaaS, the first step is to determine which technologies your company already has in place and how they’re currently being used.
The goal of this stage is to gain complete control of your network infrastructure by understanding how communications flow through your company.
Begin by conducting a complete application audit to understand all the communication services your organization actively utilizes for calling, video, e-mail, chat, and fax. Assess how employees use these tools in their daily workflows to collaborate internally with colleagues and to communicate externally with partners, prospects, and customers.
Consider, for example, the multiple tools that customer service representatives toggle between when handling calls. Compare this to the succession of systems that your sales team might use to nurture leads into customers.
This stage is critical because your new unified collaboration solution and contact center must deliver all the features required to manage your business day-to-day. Your migration to the cloud will instantly fail if you lose too much of the functionality that users depend on currently.
Stage 2: Identify opportunities for improvement
The next step of preparing for cloud migration is to identify opportunities for improvement in your existing infrastructure.
This will highlight which features will be most beneficial to your business in the cloud, whether it’s:
- Minimizing costs.
- Maximizing functionality.
- Adding scalability.
- Enhancing collaboration.
- Increasing security.
Specifically, what inefficiencies, frustrations, or failures did you observe during your audit? For example, the COVID pandemic may have exposed gaps in your business’s ability to support remote workers. Perhaps more sophisticated collaboration tools, such as video conferencing and file-sharing capabilities, could help your business run more efficiently outside the office.
Maybe the audit revealed that your current infrastructure doesn’t integrate well with your CRM application. This might be a priority for your new solution—both to improve the customer experience across multiple touchpoints and to improve the productivity of your customer-facing employees.
Given the rapid pace of change in many industries today, it’s imperative to prepare for the unexpected. Selecting a UCaaS solution is a prime opportunity to update your disaster recovery plans and security protocols.
Make sure your new solution will not only enhance your current infrastructure but also expand with scalable flexibility to future-proof your network as you grow.
Consider moving away from costly MPLS networks to a more affordable and scalable solution like SD-WAN.
Stage 3: Prepare your business
To optimize your migration to the cloud, all of your employees, partners, suppliers, and customers need to be fully prepared for the impact of the implementation.
When rolled out properly, UCaaS can empower you to refocus your resources toward important business objectives without constraining the flow of communication.
To gain buy-in across departments, be ready to communicate the benefits of UCaaS by explaining how the new solution will solve the problems you identified in your audit.
Employees want to understand how these tools will make their jobs easier, so addressing these advantages will build their support.
In preparation for adopting cloud communications, you should also review whether any of your technology (such as broadband links or handsets) should be refreshed simultaneously.
Aligning your cloud migration with major equipment upgrades and replacements can make the process more seamless.
The right UCaaS solution can enable new capabilities to help your business adapt to changing expectations. With proper due diligence and proactive planning, your migration to the cloud can transform your company into an agile business, equipped for streamlined collaboration and 24x7x365 communication.
Learn more about choosing the right UCaaS partner in our Buyer’s Guide.
Ready to unshackle your business from obsolete technologies and migrate to the cloud? Contact us today to get started!