When it comes to the quality care of the customer base, you shouldn’t leave anything to chance. You’ve likely been using a well-planned script in your communications and focus extensively on average call times, wait times and even call routing. But do you put the same level of care into selecting the right vendor to support your efforts? Do you know whether you want to focus on the in-house solution or the hosted contact center?

Answering these questions is important before you begin the process of selecting the right vendor. Chances are, however, that you are a little overwhelmed with the sheer volume of information in the market today that can make or break your decision. How do you know what’s factual and helpful information and what is nothing more than something put out by a company’s marketing department?

While selecting the right vendor is an important part of the process, you also need to determine whether or not yours will be a hosted contact center. Fortunately, there are proven benefits to the latter for the small and mid-sized organization. If yours fits into this category, it’s time to examine these benefits up close. Borrowing from a recent Five9 (News - Alert) blog, let’s take a look at what you need to know today in order to make the right decision tomorrow.

1. Capital investments are a thing of the past with the hosted contact center. The cloud allows organizations of all sizes to pay for only what they use and scale up or down to meet the changing needs of the business.
    
2. The capabilities and advantages available with the hosted platform far exceed those of the in-house option when price needs to remain constant. Therefore, the dialer or ACD needed can be fully integrated with CRM applications and departmental management, even if all available modules aren’t needed.
    
3. You have the opportunity to start with the basics and add features and applications as needed. This includes, but isn’t limited to, interactive voice response, dialing, routing, computer telephony integration, advanced call recording and so much more.
    
4. The hosted contact center offers a cloud-based dialer or ACD with a three-to-six month return on investment. This return depends upon how much you use the application, of course, but it’s real and measurable.

Five9 has a long and proven track record in the hosted contact center space. The company touts the benefits listed above because they’ve implemented them for thousands of organizations and supports their successful growth. Plus, customers have also experience greater efficiency and better effectiveness in their operations, simply by leveraging the hosted platform. If you’re ready to put this into practice, make hosted providers part of your research process.