Contact Center Software

There may have been a time when a company could build a contact center from the ground-up according to its predictable needs, depreciate it over time and have it serve their needs quite well.

Those days are over, in case you haven’t noticed.

The contact center business today requires unprecedented levels of flexibility to succeed: flexibility not only with agent pools, skills and call volume, but also with applications, maintenance and hardware. A contact center properly positioned for future growth can scale up and scale back quickly in response to volume, add agents and skills immediately as needed (or subtract them), be ready to bring new solutions online quickly, and not be tied to a single brick-and mortar location. In other words, yesterday’s model does not suit today’s business climate. Luckily, with the advent of software-as-a-service or cloud computing, customer service organizations need no longer be tethered to past business models.

Cloud-based contact centers are a prime example of a successful software-as-a-service model; over the past decade, they have matured into a stable solution that enables organizations to save money while at the same time improving the customer experience. By eliminating the need to buy hardware and build out a burdensome infrastructure, organizations can free up funds for other business areas while still maintaining a responsive IT operation.

It’s not difficult to see why this model is appealing in terms of upfront cost savings alone. Traditional premises-based contact centers require huge outlays of capital on equipment: hardware, software, phone lines, furniture and the infrastructure to support it all, including parking lots, buildings with expensive energy needs and kitchen and break  facilities. A medium-sized contact center with its equipment on-premises also requires the service of at least two full-time IT support personnel to troubleshoot problems and maintain the complex systems. A hosted solution, on the other hand, requires only a one-time set up fee plus a modest monthly per-seat price, and no IT personnel are required.

The cloud-based model is also more affordable over the long term, eliminating the expenses that come with aging hardware that takes up space, depreciates in value, requires maintenance (and costly maintenance agreements), and consumes large quantities of energy for both operations and cooling. In addition, the complex integration often required by a premises-based contact center when it comes to the center’s different solutions and applications: making sure CRM, call distribution, workforce management, sales force automation, billing, call recording, quality management and analytics all work together seamlessly, becomes the hosting provider’s headache, not the contact center’s.

In a cloud-computing model, calls come in over phones or via your Web site in click-to-call, click-to-chat or e-mail, are routed through the hosting center, and then are distributed however you wish: to the right agent to handle the call. Agents are then free to take calls or Web communications – and be an active part of the contact center – from wherever they are located: in regional offices or call centers distributed across time zones, in partner call centers, or from home. Agents require only a computer with a broadband Internet connection. Even the phone is optional: with some solutions, agents can be routed the call just as easily via VoIP over their broadband Internet connections. All they need is a headset.

From a quality standpoint, the gains may be even more impressive: the cloud computing model for a contact center entity means the center can be up and running quickly, and can expand or contract almost immediately according to demand by tapping into pools of part-time agents or home agents, or scaling back use of on-call agents. If you need more or fewer licenses for your contact center solutions, that can be arranged with the hosting company immediately. Essentially, this model allows a contact center to grow or shrink to precisely match business needs, with no unnecessary expenses and wasted capital. In a competitive business environment, this flexibility gives companies enormous advantage over competitors with premise-based contact centers. This kind of flexibility also reduces the friction between business objectives and customer satisfaction, making it possible to execute short-term activities such as promotions, events, or fundraising in order to meet sales and awareness targets. It also allows businesses to have immediate access to new and emerging technologies without buying them upfront.

Traditional, premises-based contact centers do not cope well with call spikes, seasonal increases in volume or recessions. Premise-based contact centers are one-size-fits-all, and if the needs of the business the contact center supports change, it’s still stuck with the same size contact center. If the center’s volume increases, it’s difficult to add capacity; and if call volume shrinks, the business can do nothing about it except, perhaps, take the drastic step of laying off full-time employees that might be needed in the future. As for equipment and software licenses, the conventional wisdom becomes, “You bought it, you’re stuck with it.”

On-demand contact center software providers like Contactual help companies improve their contact center operations while dramatically lowering costs and reducing risk. Contactual’s (News - Alert) Advanced Virtual Tenant Architecture (AVTA) and other proprietary technologies provide a rich set of features that companies can use to enhance the customer experience and improve agent performance. The company’s robust API suite integrates with other back-end systems, such as CRM, workforce management, and other applications critical to call center operations.

Contactual operates in Tier 1 data centers with a fully-redundant infrastructure, and provides round-the-clock network monitoring, secure SSL, and professional on-site security staff. Via the on-demand model provided by companies like Contactual, contact centers can attain proven uptimes that exceed 99.99 percent, ensuring that a contact center’s customers are never without the world-class support they need.