What is a “Cloud-Native” Contact Center and Why Should I Care?

“What is ‘cloud-native’?” is not a simple question and is one that has more than a few answers. Asking Google for help can quickly send you down a technical jargon rabbit hole from which you may emerge forever changed, but no closer to the answer you seek. To save you the trouble, a simple and commonly-found definition is as follows:

“Cloud-native is an approach to building and running applications that exploits the advantages of the cloud computing model.”

Let’s boil that down even further: cloud-native is the symbiotic practice of designing and creating applications specifically for the cloud. Once deployed in the cloud, these applications outperform those build for on-premises or hybrid environments because they were built to work in that environment. Put into a non-technical analogy; a mountain bike works best on a trail in the mountains where its fat tires and suspension can absorb the terrain undulations. That same bike still works on the road, but not nearly as well and its large tires and shock-absorption system can actually be a hindrance.

Now that we have established a reasonable baseline of what cloud-native is, let’s dive into how cloud-native applications apply to the contact center environment; why a cloud-native solution is better than an on-prem or hybrid solution and why you should you care.

The only thing consistent about the technology landscape is that it is constantly changing. A customer service operation must be agile in order to quickly adapt to changing business needs. Train travel did not adapt and has, for the most part, been left behind by airline travel. Many retailers did not adapt to the change in shopping habits brought on by Amazon and, as a result, some have been left behind. Blackberry was not prepared for the iPhone and has become a relic of the recent past. Is your organization ready for what’s next – whatever that is – or is it poised to be passed?

Unfortunately, if you are working off a rigid infrastructure, you are probably spending most of your budget and resources around maintenance and upgrades instead of innovation. Unlike legacy vendors, modern contact center platforms are born in the cloud and have the software architectures that are made for the cloud. They are cloud-native. Shifting away from archaic on-premises platforms, and even the first-generation cloud-adopted systems, to a cloud-native contact center stack will power your pace of innovation and better serve your customers and business partners.