Hosted Contact Center Featured Article

Survey Identifies Real Benefits to Hosted Contact Center

By Susan J. Campbell
TMCnet Contributing Editor

The cost and efficiency promises offered in the cloud computing space have a number of organizations seeking out the potential of the hosted contact center. In a recent Aberdeen (News - Alert) Research Benchmark report, the Aberdeen Group provided results from a survey of 129 contact center professionals to clearly identify what makes the hosted contact center shine as compared to on-premise architectures.

A number of different metrics were examined in this hosted contact center study to determine Best-in-Class Performance, yet three performance criteria were used to set Best-in-Class companies apart. The survey results show that 75 percent resolve calls on the first customer touch; there is a 17 percent decrease in the number of customer complaints over the past 12 months; and the average cost per call was $10.60 over the past 12 months.

In the Competitive Maturity Assessment, the survey results show that firms with Best-in-Class performance share a number of common characteristics, including the fact that 95 percent assign responsibility to individuals or teams for hosted contact center performance analysis; 79 percent engage in regular and consistent performance monitoring; 74 percent measure the satisfaction of customers against overall corporate goals; and 64 percent ensure information is available for the agent on-demand during the actual call.

The hosted contact center also requires certain actions of its employees to optimize performance. For Best-in-Class performance, hosted contact center leaders must be sure detailed customer transactional information is available for the agent before the call begins; hosted Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is available; business intelligence is built directly into their contact center technology strategy; and a Unified Communications (News - Alert) (UC) platform is readily leveraged.

The Aberdeen Group also examined the structure and architecture of the contact centers surveyed for this report. An on-premise architecture was described by 63 percent of contact center managers and 27 percent indicated they are moving to a hosted contact center environment. A steady 9 percent to 10 percent are fully outsourced.

For those contact centers that have migrated to a hosted contact center platform, survey results show they are realizing the rewards for adopting this infrastructure. These proven results could help to encourage others to implement hosted contact center solutions and begin to reap the benefits.

More importantly, for those who have not yet made the change, the hosted contact center can prove to have a profound impact on the internal contact center if the core business applications lack the necessary functionality; spikes or prolonged activity lulls are too costly; if integrating data from new sources is difficult; if creating unifying views of the business process across applications is a challenge; or if the contact center struggles to deploy or leverage business analytics solutions.

With so many benefits offered in the hosted contact center architecture, this segment of the market is likely to continue to grow.

• Five9 and Birst Team to Provide Business Analytics to Contact Centers
• Dispelling the Myths about Hosted Contact Centers
• Deploy a Hosted Contact Center in No Time
• Cloud-based Contact Center Company Five9 Completes Funding Round