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The Cloud Credited with Spurring Business Growth Trend

By Linda Dobel, TMCnet Contributor

We are now in the season of growth—and no, not just because it’s spring. It is an observation gleaned from inContact’s “Problem Solved Tour.”

Company growth, writes inContact’s Heather Hurst, is “a new trend in town.” She explained that she came to this conclusion after hearing firsthand that companies are in the process of growing or have it on their agenda of near-future goals. The impetus, she says, is the cloud. inContact is a cloud-based, on-demand contact center software solutions provider. Hurst wrote, “this trend seems all-encompassing and very much enabled by the cloud.” Giving credence to that line of thought, an inContact customer was quoted as saying, “If you are at a steady state and will never change your number of agents and don’t want to change, grow or improve your business strategy, the cloud is not for you. However, if you don’t fit that description…”

What does Hurst see about the cloud that fosters business growth? Pay-as-you-go is the number-one reason she cites as a factor driving the trend of companies beginning to grow instead of  stagnating, or downsizing, which was the last big trend. It makes sense because with the cloud you don’t have to pay now for capacity you may not use for years, if ever, like you have to do when you buy an on-premise system. With the cloud, Hurst correctly notes, you pay for what you currently need and can scale up or down later on depending on circumstances that dictate that you do so, such as the current growth trend, or even the business changes that occur with the changing of seasons.

Businesspeople Hurst spoke with also told her that cloud-based applications have enabled them to worry far less about their technology and focus on business initiatives instead. In fact, one customer told her that before they implemented inContact, their IVR had so many issues that talking about how to solve the problems ate up about a half an hour of their weekly executive meeting, which was topped with untold man hours to implement the fixes. The customer was happy to report that those issues no longer exist because the cloud technology is so reliable.

Finally, Hurst said the ease of upgrading with the cloud has lifted the burden of being perpetually behind the times, stuck with outdated on-premise technology. She related a story about a customer of an on-premise company she worked for previous to inContact who was always “as much as three versions behind (~seven years), and when they decided to upgrade, it was a year-long event.” By contrast, with the cloud, she said, “you’re always running the current version.”

And that, in turn, frees companies to run with the current business trend—growth.

In other news, TMCnet reported inContact Reports 2.0 provides an intuitive dashboard view of contact center results so managers can quickly assess the performance of their entire operation and use this actionable intelligence to improve the decision-making process.