“With a cloud-based call center, your team can bring home a medal no matter what the competition or the weather sends your way,” wrote industry observer Meghdutt Brahmachari on the Contactual (News - Alert) blog a while ago.

That’d be good news to the brave folks in Alabama and across the South these days, who are getting some of the worst that weather can send their way.

Maybe your conditions aren’t that extreme -- let’s hope they’re not -- but as he writes, if you manage a call center “you may have experienced changes in weather, seasonality, and the vagaries of the free market.”

In other words, stay in the cloud so you don’t have to worry about what’s in the clouds! (Pause for laughter) Thank you, crickets, for chirping out there, we’re here every Thursday, tip your waitress.

As Brahmachari says, “if you use call center software that resides in the cloud -- a virtual call center,” you’ll have the ability to adapt quickly. This is because virtual call centers give businesses the agility to adjust to changes, of which Brahmachari outlines three:

Seasonal business. A cloud-based contact center lets a florist add more agents to handle the predictable surges around Valentine's Day or Mother's Day.

Mother Nature. “If your sales team is in, say, South Florida, you can count on a hurricane coming down the pike virtually every year, threatening not just your property, but your ability to operate and service your customers,” he says. Use the cloud to reroute your calls to a safer locale.

A national market with a local budget. A hosted call center lets you add agents in a different time zone than yours-without adding the expenses of a second facility to your budget.