The promise of open clouds: Faster innovation, faster delivery

Learn how open clouds reduce latencies to client device, improve customer and device (IoT) interactions and speed up innovations from the edge to the data center.

Cloud transformation is moving quickly, according to a report released today by cloud visibility management platform CloudCheckr. In a survey of over 300 IT professionals and business stakeholders at companies with more than 500 employees, 57% reported that more than half of their infrastructure is in the cloud and 64% expected they will be fully in the public cloud within five years.

The global public cloud computing market is set to exceed $362 billion in 2022, according to Statista. (In 2018 alone, Amazon Web Services earned $26 billion in revenue for parent company Amazon.) IDG reports that the average cloud budget is up from $1.62 million in 2016 to a whopping $2.2 million today. But cloud adoption continues to present challenges for enterprises of any size. A separate Statista survey identified security, managing cloud spend, governance, and lack of resources and expertise as significant barriers to adoption.

Indeed, respondents told CloudCheckr that security concerns (44%), compliance and regulations (42%), and lack of application support (41%) remain significant barriers to cloud migration. Ninety-three percent said that their organizations face blockers with budgeting infrastructure cloud costs, and 94% said that they’d experienced unexpected cloud costs. Only 31% reported that they were able to monitor and optimize public cloud costs “effectively,” meanwhile.

Cloud adoption benefits

But on the whole, the professionals surveyed said that their investments in internal cloud strategies and teams were paying off. Those at organizations with a cloud center of excellence, a team tasked with developing a framework for cloud operations, told CloudCheckr that they saw higher benefits than those where cloud expertise wasn’t organized.

“While it’s no surprise to anyone how strong cloud adoption is today, this report shows the tremendous growth ahead and how quickly it will happen over the next half decade. Now is the time for IT organizations to define the right strategies to utilize the full potential of the cloud and for cloud service providers to enhance their capabilities to lead their customers through cloud transformations,” CloudCheckr CEO Tim McKinnon said in a press release. “Migrating to the cloud is only the first step. It’s up to organizations to adopt the right technology and form teams — be it internally or externally — to develop and manage cloud strategy, governance, and best practices.”

It seems likely that as the pandemic continues, organizations will increasingly rely on remote work — and by extension, cloud services — to help stem the spread of the virus. Gartner projects that this will cause the cloud market to grow 18.4% in 2021, with cloud predicted to make up 14.2% of total global IT spending. “As enterprises increase investments in mobility, collaboration, and other remote working technologies and infrastructure, Gartner expects growth in public cloud to be sustained through 2024,” the firm wrote in a November 2020 study.

Cloud providers are reaping the windfall benefits. In its most recent earnings report, Google said that its cloud division brought in $4.047 billion in sales for the first quarter of 2021, up 46% from the year prior. Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services) posted a record $13.5 billion in profits for 2020. And Azure, Microsoft’s cloud business, notched third quarter 2021 revenue growth of 50% year-over-year, beating analyst expectations.

The promise of open clouds: Faster innovation, faster delivery

Learn how open clouds reduce latencies to client device, improve customer and device (IoT) interactions and speed up innovations from the edge to the data center.

Presented by NICE RPA

It’s no secret that Covid-19 has put businesses under significant operational pressure to improve their service delivery approaches to stay competitive. Along with the enforced shift to new ways of working — which are likely to continue after the pandemic — one of the main drivers has been evolving customer expectations.

Today’s customers expect the same high-level service no matter what the situation. They demand quick and accurate answers to complex questions. And if their needs aren’t met, they’ll look elsewhere.

What’s more, they now expect to receive personalized and customized experiences. This is a trend that has increased in prominence as we’ve all become accustomed to operating in a digitally driven reality.

The need to be agile and adaptable to customer needs in the moment is now abundantly clear. As a result, enterprises are being forced to adapt and embrace new technologies.

One technology that can have a transformative impact is Robotic Process Automation (RPA). More specifically, attended automation. The combination of attended bots with employees can amplify the customer experience, while also driving additional operational efficiencies.

Augmenting human talent

Unlike unattended bots that run on backend servers, working on highly structured and repetitive tasks that don’t require human intervention, attended bots live on the employee’s desktop. They go beyond basic process automation, with the ability to guide employees in real time with next-best action advice. This makes attended automation ideally suited to support customer service teams during times of disruption and help them meet customers’ evolving and often complex needs.

Equipped with RPA technology, businesses can augment human talent by streamlining processes and automating the more mundane, time-consuming admin tasks. This frees service reps so that they can focus on more complex, higher-value work. Such work may include more creative and strategically driven activities that add value to customers in a relevant and personal way. In today’s competitive landscape, this is what will drive customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty.

Attended automation can also provide real-time, context-specific guidance during live customer interactions. From proactively gathering and summarizing data from multiple applications, to providing quick links to relevant data depending on the employee’s needs, this real-time intelligence can take the pressure off reps and give them the support needed to delight customers with tailored advice. Most importantly, it empowers reps to deliver more engaging, memorable, and superior customer service.

The real-time guidance component of attended automation prompts employees to interact with customers in the most effective and beneficial way, such as reading a compliance script or presenting a promotional offer at the right moment. As a result, employees will feel empowered to deliver a high-quality service, while customers will get the experience they have come to expect.

Driving service excellence

Augmenting human talent isn’t the only way attended automation can help inspire higher levels of service delivery. With humans and attended bots collaborating, several additional value drivers can be achieved.

For example, attended automation solves many of the productivity and processing accuracy challenges facing businesses. Bots can complete the same desktop tasks faster, typically reducing average handle time by 20%, and allowing employees to get more done in their working day and direct more time towards value-added work that enriches the customer experience.

Bots also ensure accuracy and compliance across all the desktop tasks they complete, minimizing the risk of data capture errors and compliance breaches down to nearly zero.

This can all directly contribute to higher levels of employee satisfaction. Research shows that repetitive work is one of the top 3 reasons for agent attrition. With transactional and process-level tasks taken off the hands of customer service employees, they can focus more on work that requires judgement, empathy, and consulting expertise. As well as increasing their engagement, this will make them happier in their roles and more likely to deliver an exceptional and engaging customer service.

Finally, employees can benefit from the enhanced training capabilities offered by attended automation. In fact, a large majority of employees complain about the difficulty they experience in learning new systems. Add to that the need to learn new processes, products, and service offerings, and the time spent in classroom and online training can add up.

Real-time process guidance delivers effective on-the-job training that results in meaningful and sustainable learning. Employees get the reassurance of knowing they will be guided every step of the way and supplied with all the support materials they need to provide experiences that keep customers coming back.

Ultimately, attended automation exists to amplify human potential and empower extraordinary service delivery. Reducing the admin burden by streamlining internal processes is a key part of the puzzle. But the true value comes from the real-time insights attended bots can provide, inspiring human workers to deliver more engaging, empathetic, and impactful customer service experiences — no matter what’s thrown at them.

Oded Karev is General Manager of NICE RPA. With extensive experience in corporate strategy and operations, Oded leads NICE’s global Advanced Process Automation line of business, covering the full spectrum of robotics solutions. Prior to his current role, he served as Director of Corporate Strategy at NICE, leading some of the company’s key growth initiatives. Before joining NICE, Oded specialized in delivering multi-channel strategies, operating model designs and digital transformation projects for Accenture. Oded is a respected industry thought leader and key note speaker in the field of Robotic Process Automation.

Sponsored articles are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. Content produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact [email protected].