Hosted contact center solutions are fast becoming a popular alternative to buying on-premises products including ACD, IVR, CTI (News - Alert), workforce management, call/screen recording, e-learning and CRM.

 

The reasons include capital cost avoidance and greatly reduced IT expenses, short lead times, flexibility and scalability, access to proven products that are pre-integrated with other offerings for seamless, simple operations, data security and business continuity via offsite servers. Hosted solutions also go hand-in-hand with home agent programs; the servers do not care where the agents and supervisors are located.

 

BT has made its hosting offering, Next Generation Contact Centre (NGCC) even more attractive with the new option of pay-per-hour/minute pricing. While most contact center platform hosts, it says, still only offer per named agent pricing packages or even per concurrent agent, BT (News - Alert) now offers a flexible pricing model to fit every type of contact center operation: per concurrent agent, per logged-in agent, per effective hour or even per effective minute from four pence (five U.S. cents) per minute. With this wide range of options, customers only pay for what they need.

 

BT’s price per minute option especially is in line with market needs. It cites research from the European Contact Centre Confederation of Organisations that states that a large number of European contact center customers want a price per minute with network traffic embedded.

 

BT's NGCC is an out-of-the-box, multi-channel hosted contact center service which bundles together the best features of BT's CRM portfolio to offer businesses powerful functionality. NGCC allows organizations them to capture customer contacts from all over the world and connect agents from wherever it is easier for them to work at any moment in time. With NGCC, supervisors and administrators can manage operations from any internet connection.

 

NGCC is BT's exclusive, proprietary version of CosmoCom, available in North America, Europe and Asia under two delivery models: the shared platform NGCC On-Demand, and the dedicated platform NGCC On-Net. Its key features include multi-channel ACD (phone, videophone, e-mail, Internet), network-based IVR, unified queuing and routing, browser-based system provisioning, real-time reporting and recording reviews and training. It also supplies interconnections to global voice and IP networks, worldwide delivery of calls to agents anywhere via 150 country access numbers and central management of all agents: including remote sites and home agents.

 

NGCC is one of the most global and geo-resilient hosted contact center platform in the marketplace, says BT. It has physical points of presence (POPs) on three continents and extended coverage and granularity using BT Global Inbound, BT Onevoice and BT MPLS global networks. BT manages over 8 billion minutes per year on its global inbound platforms and hosted contact center.

 

And to sweeten the deal BT Global Services (News - Alert) and BT Business is offering a special promotion for three months and 50 agents free of charge for all U.K. and U.S. customers who sign a contract for NGCC before March 31. For promotion to be valid, agents must be active on the platform before then. Offer is valid for up to 50 agents per month for three months (there is no carry over from month to month). Agents over and above the 50 are chargeable.

 

“Businesses today face the dual challenge of ensuring excellent customer service while keeping capital expenditure costs under control,” says Neil Sutton, vice president, global portfolio, BT Global Services. “Today's announcement means that businesses can move into 2010 with the assurance and flexibility that they can maintain full service regardless of unforeseen events at prices to suit them.”