The C-suite is focusing heavily on customer satisfaction because customers have enormous power to make or break a company with one viral social media post. Consequently, the pace of innovation for CX technologies is dramatically faster today than it was just three years ago. That’s created some challenges for those operating on-premises contact centers. For example, it can be difficult to meet business demands quickly because rolling out new capabilities may involve acquiring or writing an application, spinning up a server, integrating it with the existing platform, and testing it.

In addition, on-premises contact center platforms only last so long before they become end-of-life, making it difficult to find parts or support. Once that happens, the cost to replace the equipment may not be in the budget.

Technology limitations affect all aspects of customer experience. CX leaders need agile options to use technology to meet business demands. For example, companies must be able to quickly add interaction channels because customers and business units are demanding them. Adding them via cloud applications gets the capabilities online more quickly, which is one reason companies add AI using cloud applications twice as much as those using on-premises applications. At the same time, agent turnover, at 21%, is a big problem that requires new agent analytics applications. Along with analytics, artificial intelligence and automation improves efficiencies, delivers contextual information, and improves customer ratings.