When companies are choosing a new contact center platform, they’re often doing so with cost in mind. Most companies today wish to save money, and today’s newer hosted and cloud-based on-demand contact center solutions can help them do that. Instead of paying for a solution up front (and then paying for upgrades and updates), an on-demand solution allows a company to pay little upfront and account for it as an operating expense instead of a capital expenditure.

Second to cost, many companies are choosing on-demand call center solutions because they’re seeking multichannel functionality they need but simply can’t get with a premise-based solution without forking out a lot of time and money for modifications that may or may not work. Multichannel functionality is cited often second only to cost when contact centers seeking a hosted solution are polled.

The truth is that the call center on-demand model offers far more benefits than cost and integrated multichannel functionality. They can also make it easier for contact centers to offer the kinds of shortcuts, perks and benefits that customers today have come to expect, according to a recent blog post by the marketing team at Crexendo. These features also provide the kind of telephony features which promote success through efficiency and productivity.

Customers don’t like to wait on hold. In fact, it’s one of their main irritants. Today’s on-demand solutions can offer ways to mitigate hold times, including announcements to customers of position in queue (so customers can know how long before they are served) as well as callback options. They also offer voicemail shortcuts, which provide callers with the option to leave a voice message for an agent to answer later.

“Not every caller has the patience or ability to endure long wait times during periods of high call volume,” writes Crexendo. “Providing customers with a voicemail shortcut allows agents to attend to more customers than would otherwise be possible.”

Some solutions improve the productivity of the contact center by offering a maximum calls per agent feature that prevents long hold-times and agent burn-out at the same time.

“By limiting the amount of callers which can be put into a queue, call centers can ensure that they only take on the amount of callers that their agents can realistically handle within a reasonable amount of time,” writes the Crexendo marketing team. “Having a reasonable queue wait time gives call center agents more time to thoroughly answer customer inquiries which in turn boosts overall customer satisfaction.”

Contact centers are, of course, run by humans, and humans are imperfect. But many of today’s on-demand contact center solutions can help “human proof” the process, ensuring that quality thresholds are upheld, managers are notified quickly when there are problems and – most important – customers are provided with the options they expect.