So it’s Spring 2009, and your contact center development budget has already been cut due to expected revenue downturns. Yet your business partners keep knocking at your door for new applications, because they’re being asked to get creative with their revenue generation and retention efforts. And, you’re being asked to pull costs out of your expense budget, which inevitably comes from IT or development headcounts. Maybe your contact center is contracting, too.  All of these conflicting pressures and market changes are forcing companies to seek out new options. Contact centers and IT organizations can get more functionality with less investment by blending their current solutions with many combinations of hosted or SaaS (News - Alert) solutions, from call routing to CRM to unified communications (UC).

 

Hosted or SaaS solutions help businesses control costs and offer speed-to-market advantages; notably: on-demand capacity, easier activations and integrations with shorter timelines and business flexibility that comes from fully loaded solutions. 

 

On-demand capacity has advantages in all seasons for companies looking to control costs of installing and maintaining IVR and ACD ports. And in particular, companies with high peaks and low valleys (such as retail and tax preparation firms) can avoid paying for excess port capacity on all their systems. Every ACD and IVR port has a purchase cost and an annual maintenance fee, in addition to the purchase and maintenance fees on the hardware and data center space and headcount required to support it. 

 

These software and hardware purchases are decided based on forecasts and estimations, which can be off target for many uncontrollable reasons. Using the on-demand capacity not only aligns expenses with usage, but it aligns resources with demand, potentially enabling better service and increasing revenue capture rates.

 

Supplementing an existing premises based solution with a new hosted contact center solution is probably easier than most contact center and IT teams expect. And that might be attributed to the fact that most major contact center manufacturers offer premises-based and hosted versions of the same solution. An existing contact center ACD works with a hosted IVR, and a PBX (News - Alert) works with a hosted ACD much in the same way they do when deployed in a premises-based model. This is especially true in the case of call flow and the overall customer experience, because hosted IVR providers deliver the same features as premises-based solutions. 

 

The integration of a hosted solution to premises-based contact center components is not a mystery. Most hosted IVR and ACD providers offer inbound voice circuits, IP or TDM, to deliver the calls to the ports and the application servers, which offer either self-service or managed application development. Some even support customer hosted VoiceXML (News - Alert) code to let companies leverage existing Web-based customer applications. Customer hosted VoiceXML integrated with expansive hosted IVR port capacity is a powerful combination. Customers gain control and freedom to deliver dynamic service to their own customers. 

 

To get the caller from the service provider cloud to agents at home offices or corporate locations, providers usually extend the call using carrier circuits, TDM or IP toll free numbers, to a DID (home, mobile or office). Hosted solutions not only provide near real-time control over IVR scripting and call flows, they can also offer tools to manage call termination details. 

 

Many hosted solutions can also send or accept caller information to enable desktop screen-pop and update CRM applications. Avoid extra transport charges by incorporating carrier take-back and transfer features, which prevent call tromboning with hosted solutions.

 

Hosted IVRs and hosted ACDs can interoperate and integrate with a variety of business phone systems, from the home office to the IP PBX – hosted or customer-owned. Agents using a Hosted ACD can simply click on a URL, enter their password and start taking calls. Customers who already have a phone solution may simply want to route calls to a DID, and others may want to try VoIP terminations.

 

Like hosted IVR, hosted ACDs offer the same feature sets and often from the same vendors as customer-owned solutions, including skill-based routing, call queuing, agent monitoring and call recording and others. All offer agent, supervisor and administrator training. Depending on the level of support and customization, most hosted ACDs can be activated within five to thirty days, which is far speedier than the time it would take to source and deliver hardware, project managers, installers and trainers for customer-owned solutions.

 

Dispelling the notion that a SaaS solution is less flexible or customizable than customer-owned solutions, rest assured that hosted solutions offer geographic freedom and design flexibility. Call flows can be designed with sophisticated call handling features, like speech applications, database look-ups that support advanced call routing and self service, remote audio updates and network transfers. A few even integrate with intelligent call routing and CTI (News - Alert) frameworks to enable intelligent network queuing and to deliver more caller data to the CRM application. 

 

If a location shuts down due to a natural disaster, enterprises can easily route calls to branch offices or home offices. Thus hosted solutions offer a built-in disaster recovery capability and an alternative to purchasing two geographically redundant and identical ACDs or IVRs, so hosted solutions can help control costs too.  

 

Here’s another way to control costs – many hosted ACDs are already established or stepping into the unified communications space, offering built-in UC or integration capabilities to other UC solutions to offer Instant Messaging, conferencing, email, Web-chat and soft-phone features. The degree to which each services the enterprise employee varies today but the clear direction is integration and extension beyond the contact center. 

 

Arguably, the most important tool for the agent is the desktop. In a hosted environment, that will likely include an interaction control bar or softphone, plus a CRM application – both of which can be hosted. Hosted CRM firms build an entire line of business around integrations with other contact center applications, whether hosted or not. Integrations can be as simple as a drag and drop, or slightly more complex, such as integrations to premises databases, IVRs or ACD solutions.

 

Hosted or SaaS solution providers are flexible and creative in their pricing strategies, offering a variety of options such as charging per login, per named user, per dip and per call, so enterprises should select the option that best suits their business need. Ideally, enterprises only pay for what they use. Some require minimum commitments for better rates. Regardless of how your favorite solution prices out, consider the ROI and TCO – hosted solutions may be the cost efficient option. 

 

An IT team would be challenged to find a contact center feature or solution that cannot be delivered in a hosted, or SaaS, model today. And with their rapid deployment models, the hosted contact center solution can greatly reduce the need for expensive IT resources to establish the hardware platform, deploy the software and write integration code for the IVR, ACD, UC and CRM applications. 

 

Before you let the spring floods, capital cutbacks or panicked marketing managers concern you, remember that you have an abundance of SaaS options to create effective and efficient contact center solutions with your existing (dare we say “legacy”) systems today.