Industry analysts estimate that more than 70 percent of all customer interactions occur through "live" phone conversations or interactive voice response interactions alone. Organizations are looking for contact centers to manage these customer interactions across sales, marketing, and service without having to build a traditional contact center infrastructure, which requires costly investments in hardware, software, and customization.

And boy, do small and medium-sized businesses hate costly customization and infrastructural investments. Out of the box results are exactly what they want.

The Five9 Virtual Contact Center for salesforce.com has garnered rave reviews from small companies. Reviews from users with fewer than 75 employees range from the deployment has been easy, and the customer support has been very responsive to We are able to provide more advanced/intelligent customer care and input real-time information about their customers directly into their databases, while simultaneously making use of the full call center features and control needed on our end. Additionally, weve found it easily scales to meet our needs and offers stable performance.

In mid-March CosmoCom, whose all-IP, universal access contact center system is a widely-used platform of choice for top-tier network service providers announced that Japan Telecom has deployed Contact Center On-Demand services based upon the CosmoCall Universeplatform.

Japan Telecom is one of a growing number of major telephone companies offering the hosted contact center as an alternative to traditional premise-based solutions. Japan Telecom acquired the CosmoCall Universe platform from HP Japan and Takachiho Koheki. HP Japan and TK also provided Japan Telecom with system integration and implementation services for the Contact Center On-Demand platform.

Market research firm Frost & Sullivan sees a growing demand in the Asia/Pacific region, and certainly in Japan, for hosted contact center services following the on-demand model, according to Audrey William, Lead Call Center Analyst for Frost & Sullivan in the Asia Pacific Region.

And this past week Siebel Systems, Inc. has released its Siebel CRM OnDemand Release 7, which extends the capabilities of Siebel CRM OnDemand by providing a hosted contact center solution available as a prebuilt option within hosted CRM.

Analysts see the move as part of Siebels almost frenzied attempts to dominate the hosted market. As DestinationCRM notes, Siebel unveiled Release 7 not three months since the most recent installment of the company's on-demand solution, and the recent upgrade is its seventh on-demand release in about a year and a half.

DestinationCRM remarks that the hosted space has gained traction among SMBs looking to rapidly implement contact center solutions and realize significant cost-savings by evading installation and maintenance expenses, with companies turning to ASPs like Salesforce.com to manage customer interactions.

Late last year Ocwen Financial Corp. decided to jump into the contact center software market with in-house-developed software. The West Palm Beach, Fla.-based financial services firm will be offering its Advanced Contact Center Enterprise Solution contact center software as a hosted and managed product, according to Dale Pickford, vice president of the new ACCES unit within Ocwen.

This is the first time Ocwen has offered software for a horizontal application, according to Pickford. Its three other software offerings are niche products for the financial services markets.

ACCES has a virtual contact center capability that will allow customers to deploy multiple contact centers around the world, Pickford said. The product uses the Customer Voice Portal platform, previously called Internet Service Node, from Cisco Systems Inc. as a foundation and integrates applications for contact centers from other vendors as well. Besides doing the integration, Ocwen developed the management software, a reporting function that allows users to get a view of the various functions running together, and a customer relations expert, according to Pickford.

Bruce Cleveland, Senior Vice President and General Manager, OnDemand and SMB at Siebel Systems is aiming squarely at the SMB market when he touts Siebel CRM OnDemand Release 7 as a fast-to-deploy, easy-to-use, and highly robust hosted contact center that doesn't require additional infrastructural investments.

Rob Martens, Director of Global Front Office Technology at Ingersoll-Rand, hardly the typical customer for the product, reports reductions of cost and implementation complexity with Release 7. If Siebel really is going after the SMB market, as their marketing strongly suggests, theyd do better wheeling out success stories from, well, SMBs.

But you cant argue with the price of hosted contact center systems. As an example of ballpark figures, pricing for Siebel CRM OnDemand bundled with Siebel Contact OnDemand starts at $150 per user per month, with additional telephony charges based upon usage. Additional bundles with Siebel CRM OnDemand's Industry Editions are also available, and Siebel Contact OnDemand is also available as a stand-alone offering that can be easily integrated with any on premise or hosted CRM solution for $100 per user per month, with additional telephony charges based upon usage.

David Sims is contributing editor and CRM Alert columnist for TMCnet.