Hosted Contact Center Featured Article

Three Key Contact Center Challenges When Choosing Hosted Solutions

By TMCnet Special Guest
Randy Saunders, Marketing Director, Cincom Systems Customer Experience Management products

Hosted software solutions can provide many things: lower costs, increased flexibility, and faster deployments to name a few. But like every large technology purchase, there are a few challenges you must face to ensure success. Here are three key challenges that must be addressed to successfully leverage hosted solutions.

 

1. Evaluating Data Ownership and Security

 

 

Security is one of the primary concerns that companies encounter when evaluating a hosted solution. In reality, the average service provider has more than sufficient security processes in place. They will have extensive policies, procedures, and technology in place to ensure around-the-clock, optimal performance of the solution. Utilizing a combination of security measures that provide robust, system-wide protection and reliability allows clients to focus on the application and its uses rather than the security infrastructure.

 

Hosted solutions represent some of the most reliable and scalable applications on the market. To achieve expected client results, a service provider must maintain a robust network environment with extensive data redundancy, application monitoring, and pre- and post-production quality assurance procedures. Moreover, a multi-tiered operations team is needed to employ industry best practices for disaster recovery and operations support, ensuring quick resolution of client issues including:

 

• Risk-sensitive disaster recovery systems and processes

 

• Co-location and redundancy

 

• Fault-tolerant system components

 

• A tiered software quality assurance process

 

• 24x7 application monitoring and technical support

 

Hosted solutions enable end-users to adopt sophisticated contact center functionality without all of the complexities and investments that would be required to implement the solution on-site. The service provider's expertise as well as their investments in security, networking, monitoring, and reliability are not easily replicated, and the costs are spread across numerous clients, resulting in lower costs and faster implementations.

 

2. Leveraging Existing IT Investments for Seamless Integration

 

A core architectural philosophy of many hosted solutions is to facilitate non-intrusive integration with current legacy/enterprise systems and data. This allows organizations to leverage existing application and system investments. The focus of the integration framework is to enable an organization to span multiple systems in order to see a single view of a customer across the enterprise with all of the information necessary to effectively handle, manage, and report against any interaction or transaction exception. Often marketed under terms such as “unified agent desktop” or “composite agent desktop,” the integration framework should also meet the following goals:

 

• Enable customers and partners to integrate the hosted solution with the existing IT infrastructure without expensive and time-consuming systems integration work.

 

• Facilitate secure and seamless integration across firewalls.

 

• Provide minimal impact on customer and partner systems.

 

• Leverage market-leading integration tools.

 

The web-based framework leverages data that resides in existing front-end and back-end systems versus replacement or complex integration. This framework and system collaboration process eliminates the integration challenges of data replication and associated data currency and accuracy issues. By doing this, the creation of a relevant and accurate transactional and interaction view is completed in days, not months or years.

 

3. Streamlining Implementation and Maintenance

 

A true, Net-Native Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) solution eliminates the need for client/server applications on user desktops, saving in initial installation and ongoing maintenance costs. Plus, this solution utilizes the internet as a global delivery system for maximum uptime and flexibility while ensuring full security.

 

Moreover, some hosted solutions can provide an environment that can be customized and extended with additional fields and tabs from the configuration console, without development work. Not only does this result in quick implementations, it also eliminates additional work when upgrading or moving customizations or data schemas during version upgrades, migrations, or standard certification to production processes.

 

 

This article is an excerpt from the white paper “The Hosted Model: Simplifying Contact Center and Agent Desktop Solutions." To download the complete white paper, go to www.cincom.com/hostedmodel.

 

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Randy Saunders is the marketing director for Cincom’s Customer Experience Management products. He can be contacted at rsaunders@cincom.com.

 

Cincom Systems delivers innovative software and services to simplify complex business processes. For nearly 40 years, we have empoweredthousands of clients worldwide to outperform their competition by providing ways to increase revenue,control cost, minimize risk, and achieve rapid ROI. For more information about Cincom, call 1-800-2CINCOM (USA only), send an e-mail to info@cincom.com, or visit the company’s website at www.cincom.com.

Co-location (COLO)	X
A data center where multiple telecommunications or network service providers locate their connections adjacent at the physical layer to each other's Points Of Presence (POP). Also sometimes refered to...more