Early leaders of cloud contact center services offered a compelling picture to smaller contact centers. While large enterprise contact centers could afford the kinds of prices premise-based vendors were commanding, they were leaving smaller organizations out in the cold. Enter the cloud-based contact center solution, and suddenly smaller contact centers could have a complete contact center platform that included many advanced features they could only dream of before, such as speech recognition, analytics, modern reporting, skills-based routing, an easily configurable interactive voice response (IVR) system, multichannel capabilities and more.

Price, of course, was one of the most important drivers of the cloud-based contact center and that remains the case today. But larger contact centers that may not be so price-sensitive are continuing to turn to the cloud for reasons that transcend price.

A recent Five9 blog about how companies are recognizing benefits beyond cost outlined many of the reasons contact centers that are small, large and in-between are continuing to pursue cloud-based solutions.

“When it comes to software in the cloud, the ability to provide updates both large and small has been streamlined – giving customers efficient and simple ways to take advantage of new capabilities quickly. Rather than collecting dust in a closet, cloud solutions have the potential to get better every single day.”

Five9’s (News - Alert) vice president of Product Marketing, Liz Osborne, who often writes about the expanding adoption of the cloud contact center model, noted that, “the cloud is about more than the technology, it is about enabling businesses and bringing ideas to the market.”

One of the business models that have thrived with the advent of cloud-based contact center solutions has been the home agent idea. With a premise-based solution, most agents had to work in a single location out of necessity. When companies began adopting cloud contact center solutions, they discovered new benefits of a virtual contact center: agents could be physically located anywhere, from satellite offices to their homes. This offered not only the ability to save money by (in some cases) doing away with physical contact centers, but it also allowed customer support organization to pull in expertise from other locations and ensure that the contact center remained staffed in case of weather emergencies or power outages. It also allowed them to bring extra personnel online when unexpected call volumes occurred, enabling them to meet targets and keep the quality of service up while keeping costs down.

If your business has evaluated a cloud-based solution solely on the premise of cost and decided against it, it’s time to take another look at the plethora of advantages the cloud can offer any customer-facing organization in pursuit of customer experience excellence.