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Hosted call centers have seen increased penetration as the need for inexpensive customer service technologies continues to rise. As one of the first in the hosted call center space and one of today’s leaders in the industry, Contactual’s (News - Alert) presence has grown substantially over the 10 years they’ve been in business.

TMC had a chance to speak with Contactual’s vice president of Worldwide Sales & Marketing, Wendell Black, earlier this month. Black offered his thoughts on where the hosted call center space stands today, and where it’s headed.

Contactual has always been a hosted call center provider. Many other providers offer hosted solutions as an alternative to their appliance-based products, but this is not the case for the Redwood City, Calif.-based company. Black said, “When I got into the hosted solution in 2000, it was a bleeding-edge technology; now everything is hosted. Telephony is still lagging in the move to cloud technology though, and the amount that people spend on premise-based solutions is huge.”

Reduction in total cost of ownership, increased service levels and flexibility are all advantages that hosted solutions bring to a customer. In Contactual’s case, providing utilities to those directly interfacing with customers also offers distinct advantages.

“With the front-line people, you want to give tools to the call center managers or supervisors; making them empowered lets them make changes that can affect customers immediately,” Black said.

So, you might ask, where is Contactual seeing the most adoption? While the industries utilizing hosted solutions are many and varied, augmentation for existing infrastructure is the biggest request that Contactual receives from its customers.

Black said, “People who have some old PBX (News - Alert) and want more functionality come to us for that functionality. At a low monthly cost, you give them the ability to expand and get value out of the infrastructure that they already have investment in.”

As for growth plans, Contactual is looking at several ways to bolster their hosted options. “Broader integration with CRM solutions as an out-of-the-box deliverable, doing more with Oracle (News - Alert) and Microsoft, continuing to expand our APIs -- we’re looking toward that sort of thing,” Black said.

The company also wants to shore up its presence in the predictive dialer space by offering technologies that have more to offer than the standard dialer. Black pointed out during his conversation with TMC that, “customers want campaign management systems not just dialers. This way from a day-to-day process they can launch lots of concurrent campaigns at once. Solutions that support B2B selling or B2C, that has a more unique angle, that’s where we’re focused. Standard predictive dialers are more for bill collectors, political campaigns; we think there’s more to it than that.”

There’s still plenty of room for growth for those offering call center software, so much so that defection rates between providers is close to zero. The broad spectrum of vertical markets, CSS (News - Alert), tech support and telesales that can benefit from hosted solutions are still largely untapped, and will likely continue the slow march to hosted solutions as the technology gains acceptance.

Considering the epic earnings Contactual posted this week, one will realize Contactual’s stalwart dedication to the hosted call center space is what has allowed the company to succeed and what will continue to fuel its presence in the space.

Chris DiMarco is a Web Editor for TMCnet. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University. Prior to joining TMC Chris worked with e-commerce provider Suresource as a contact center representative and development analyst. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page. Follow him on Twitter (News - Alert) @cpdimarco.

Edited by Tammy Wolf