TMCnews Featured Article

Cloud-based predictive dialers are hot. This is hard to dispute. But is this move to hosted dialers right for every business? Should your business choose a cloud-based predictive dialer or go with an on-premise solution?

While there are advantages to cloud-based dialers, there also are reasons why you may still want to select an on-premise solution.

Here are four of the top reasons why on-premise predictive dialers have an edge in many cases.

Security. The cloud introduces many benefits, not least of which is its connectivity with other Web services, and its software-as-a-service model of pay-as-you-go. But security is one challenge for the cloud. With cloud-based solutions, there’s the need to pass data from a server on the Internet to the contact center using the dialer. This is inherently less secure than keeping the data in-house, and that’s one advantage for on-premise dialers.

With on-premise dialers such as the Spitfire predictive dialer, it is possible to place the dialer behind a firewall and keep customer data locked down in a way that Web-based dialers just cannot match.

Control. One advantage of the cloud is letting someone else take care of the technology. This can be a boon, but it also can be a liability. There’s less control with Web services by definition, and going with a cloud dialer requires that a contact center give up much of its control and give it to the cloud host. With an on-premise dialer, the contact center controls its own system, can choose the carrier it wants, can make as many calls as it needs, and is in the driver’s seat.

Customization. Simplicity is needed for just about any cloud-based service, predictive dialers included. Yet this makes these dialers less able to integrate with legacy systems and more obscure products, and integrating cloud-based dialers with CRM systems can often be a problem. On-premise dialers give not only full control, but also a much wider range of customization options for particular contact center needs.

Cost. Much is written about how cloud services are cheaper than their on-premise counterparts, but if you do the math when it comes to most cloud services, you quickly see that a small monthly fee adds up to more than the up-front cost of most on-premise dialing solutions. If a contact center only needs a predictive dialer for a couple of months, the cloud definitely costs less. But what contact center only needs a predictive dialer for a few months? On-Premise solutions almost always are the better value.

There’s no arguing that in some situations a cloud-based predictive dialer makes sense. But what’s lost in the hype of the cloud is that on-premise solutions often still make more sense.

Every business needs to take a look and decide if the cloud is right for them — and which software makes sense for the cloud. Often predictive dialers make more sense as an on-premise solution.