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We’ve all heard of Doctors without Borders, but what about call centers without borders—or walls? Not any, not anywhere.

That’s a concept a recent LiveVox Inc. hosted predictive dialer blog explored. In the past, physical, bricks and mortar call centers were necessary only to house the physical, premise-based technologies necessary to run an efficient operation such as contact technologies, training and monitoring technologies, and CRM, the blog contends. Those technologies, however, have never been what is credited as bringing great achievement to the centers. On the contrary; it is “the agents, workflow efficiency and processes that drive customer satisfaction,” not the predictive dialer or the ACD, the blog points out. And because the technology has traditionally been there in the call center, the people had to be there as well.

As hosted calling and routing tools came along it became possible to have home-based agents in small groups networked to the main call center. That made it clear that the bricks and mortar concept wasn’t the only way to go---and perhaps not the best way to go either. But we were still talking about small groups.

Enter enterprise-level cloud networking and say goodbye to “the expensive site-to-site networking and the WAN limitations” and the need for physical call center housing.

Now that people can think in terms of call centers without walls, the blog poses a hypothetical scenario that enterprise-level cloud networking could make a reality. The blog asks readers to: “Imagine 500 agents with laptops and USB headsets walking into 500 McDonalds across the U.S., and in the time it takes to make the broadband connection have access to a full suite of contact center technology (PBX (News - Alert), dialer, ACD, recording, reporting, etc.).”  It said that number of agents could double and occur worldwide if they were “connected through a secure enterprise Cloud.” That cloud, it continued, would have to support “a highly scalable, fully portable global agent mesh that delivers efficient workflows; sub-second global transfers; centralized campaign control; integrated contact applications; and PCI (News - Alert) certification.” Of course, security would need to be considered and the restaurant’s locations would need adequate bandwidth.

The conclusion? While the McDonalds example is just a fun hypothetical, large-scale enterprise-level cloud contact centers could put contact centers that are locked within borders into the pages of history books.

In other news, TMCnet reported that Siemens Enterprise Communications (News - Alert) announced the launch of OpenScape Cloud Contact Center, an innovative all-in-one enterprise grade offering that provides customers with advanced contact center capabilities through cloud.