Migration tips: Moving from legacy to cloud communications
Cloud-based telecom services have become pivotal for organizations looking to scale new offerings and improve user experience for their customers. While there are many benefits associated with operating cloud-based telecom solutions, the migration process of moving services from on-premises to the cloud can seem daunting. However, they can easily be mitigated through planning and partnership with providers.
In order to alleviate these worries and ensure “business as usual” for staff and customers, organizations’ IT teams should approach their telecom cloud migration with a game plan and thoughtful approach.
Below is a checklist we created to help organizations simplify the process of migrating their communication services to the cloud, from planning to execution.
- Define objectives and anticipate challenges
Migrating to the cloud takes planning and preparation. IT leaders and department managers must work together to develop a strategy for migration that will meet their company’s objectives, while also addressing customer’s changing needs. With a plan in place and clear objectives, they can then select a provider that will help implement the desired strategy.
The plan should outline potential challenges the organization may face during migration. A great way to identify these challenges is by answering a series of planning questions. Below are the questions and guidance around how to approach them.
- What business features should we migrate first? Companies should migrate video and voice conferencing features first, because they are often the offerings most familiar to customers (thanks to apps like Skype and FaceTime).
- How will we train staff? After defining migration steps, training staff should come next to ensure customer service needs can be addressed during the migration process.
- How will we inform customers? To inform customers, we recommend communicating across all channels – including email, mail, company website, company blog and social media.
- What is the go-live date? The time between the decision to migrate to the go-live date should be long enough to accomplish each of these tasks – three to six months is a good best practice.
Having a plan in place provides business leaders with oversight and helps the company stay on track during transition.
- Pilot and test solutions
As with any new technology purchase or product installment, it is important to do work upfront to ensure the transition of services will be seamless come time of the deployment. If the team has chosen to migrate video conferencing to the cloud first, as introduced above, they should test out the system with team members in a sandbox, or controlled environment during training sessions before using it to interact with customers or partners.
Once initial testing has been completed, a business may choose to trial these offerings with select customers. Customers can be selected randomly or chosen based on what services they use regularly. Business leaders can then obtain feedback from trial customers, which can be used to further train customer service representatives or will solidify the company’s decision to migrate to the cloud. Taking these extra precautions will afford the company with control to monitor deployment and address any issues should there be any, before rolling out the solution customer wide.
- Evaluate customer response and be proactive
Once a business has migrated its services to the cloud, it should monitor how customers are responding and how services are running. After securing this feedback, they can determine if they need to make additions or updates to their current offerings. Also, as technology continues to advance, IT decision makers should keep a strong pulse on how new technologies will further evolve current cloud offerings. As customer needs continue to change, the business may find a need for different cloud offerings such as international numbers or fully cloud-hosted telco communications.
Migrating services to cloud-based systems is ultimately a way for companies to scale and elevate their current offerings operations. Being proactive around how to manage communication offerings after the migration is completed and services are up and running distinguishes market leaders from their competitors.
How Flowroute can help
Flowroute has leveraged these migrations tips to help enterprises have a smooth transition when integrating cloud offerings. Our quality and patented HyperNetworkTM, which is available in more than 160 countries around the world, allows companies to select telephone numbers that are optimal for their business and rapidly extend the reach of their network.
Flowroute also grants developers the ability to scale offerings when building on top of an API or port, and route phone numbers within seconds right from the Flowroute Customer Portal, which provides added efficiency, customization and flexibility. In addition, Flowroute’s support team is accessible to customers should they need extra assistance during migration. Our easy-to-use solutions are ideal for customers looking to move communications to the cloud with little to no disruption to their business.
