In a call center, two things are generally paramount: keeping costs under control while keeping customer service high. Often considered mutually exclusive goals, many call centers must take extraordinary steps to try and accomplish the two feats simultaneously.

But it may not be as much about what you are using, solutions-wise, in your call center. It can also be about how you are using your call center solutions. Premises-based software, once standard in call centers, gradually gave way to hosted solutions that allow call centers to use applications that are delivered by the vendor via a virtual private network connection, rather than residing on the call center’s servers and desktops.

The appeal was understandable: fewer IT resources – both equipment and personnel – were required with hosted solutions. However, many companies that use hosted solutions are still finding limitations. Often, with hosted applications, the call center is as locked into a certain number of licenses as they would be with traditional software, which can make growth (or shrinkage) of call volume and personnel in a call center just as painful as if they’d bought the application in a box, which eliminates any benefit that might come from scalability or flexibility. From an accounting standpoint, the hosted solution goes into the budget in a similar manner to tangible software. And finally, in an era where a call center is less a physical place and more of a concept – a distributed group of individuals who might be in various call center locations around the world, in partner companies or outsourced service providers, sales offices or even on the road, a hosted solution still presents limitations.

Many companies have shed the limitations of both premises-based software and hosted solutions by turning to applications delivered as software-as-a-service. Often erroneously used interchangeably, the terms “hosted” and “software-as-a-service” (or SaaS (News - Alert)) are quite different. And for many call centers, SaaS provides the kind of flexibility and cost savings that their long-term goals demand.

For starters, many hosted solutions today are merely tweaked versions of premise-based software; that is, they were never designed for the kind of scalability that true SaaS can provide. With hosted applications, a vendor will host a solution on a single server for each client, which eliminates any possibility of shared resources, and makes ramping up in the event of higher call volume nearly impossible without incurring increased expenses (and when call volume drops, the call center will see little cost savings due to resources they are not using).

With the SaaS model, on the other hand, application vendors can store the solution on a number of servers and include overflow capacity, so call centers using the solution can expand and contract as needed. The shared resources also bring economies of scale into the picture, which means that the costs can scale down as the flexibility goes up.

While hosted solutions usually require a dedicated network connection between the vendor and the call center, SaaS suffers from no such limitations, which means that the greater call center can access the solution from anywhere: disparate, global call centers; sales offices or even sales and customer service personnel’s laptops and smart phones.

Essentially, call centers using SaaS-delivered solutions can “virtualize” the applications, structuring their call center entity in the best configuration possible for high quality and controlled costs, and change the configuration as needed. Costs become lower, since the SaaS model demands far less capital to bring up and running, and far less maintenance cost to go forward. Rapid deployment of both the initial solution and faster access to upgrades and new features also go a long way toward helping keep customer service high while controlling costs.

In the long run, in today’s more virtual, less fixed and more flexible call centers, software-as-a-service goes a long way toward eliminating the headaches and the costs presented by more traditional application delivery.