Virtual Call Center

Contactual (News - Alert) officials know the topic that “goes to the heart of every business operating today.” Yep, including yours: “How to outmaneuver your competitors in an environment where change is a constant, cost containment is critical and flexibility is more important than ever before.”

Are they right? Is that a particular concern of yours? We thought so.

The whole point of computing, when it comes to business, anyway, has been about enabling people and businesses to do more with less. That’s taken another great leap forward in recent years with the advent of cloud computing.

Small and medium size businesses latched on to cloud computing, because they could use it to get multi-channel tools they couldn’t dream of affording and installing on their own. And they were provided with fast deployment, easy management and robust functionality -- without the SMB having to hire more weird IT geeks. No wonder this  market is forecast to grow six-fold by 2020 to $241 billion, according to Contactual officials.

Bigger enterprises are a bit slower on the uptake with cloud computing, mostly due to scalability and security concerns. It remains dominated by SMBs, which accounted for 75 percent of the market share in 2010. The benefits are simply unavoidable -- it “greatly simplifies their operations by letting them operate state-of-the-art contact centers with their existing staff while the host does all the heavy lifting of keeping the data center up and running,” as Contactual explains. So the SMB can get on with whatever its business really is.

Cloud-based contact centers give SMBs all the bells and whistles they want to affordably pay for -- integrated e-mail and chat, skill-based routing and deployment in days, not weeks. The ROI is there, too, as Contactual reminds us: “With the implementation of CTI (News - Alert) along, an average 40-seat contact center taking 40,000 calls per month will recognize a reduction in cost per call from $1.75 to $0.77, which translates to $468,000 savings per year.”

Throw in the lower labor, real estate and utility costs, and less agent turnover as well and pretty soon you’re talking about saving some real money.