Workforce Management Featured Article
Cloud Solutions Tailor Made to Help SMB Contact Center Succeed
Companies have a lot of choices to make today when it comes to enterprise solutions. They must choose a solution – and picking a partner vendor that will be there for them is one of the most important elements of this. They also need to choose a delivery model for that choice. Premises-based solutions in which the company must purchase both the hardware AND the software and then operate and update it to the best of their abilities was once the norm. In the last decade or so, they’ve had other options: either a hosted or cloud-based solution. Despite the proliferation of these delivery options, confusion still exists regarding the difference between hosted and cloud-based.
It’s easy to get confused, particularly for non-IT people. But there is an important distinction, according to a recent white paper by workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software (News - Alert). These distinctions can result in very different outcomes.
“Because hosted and cloud solutions both require some form of outsourcing, the terms have sometimes been considered synonymous, but they are not,” according to the white paper’s authors. “Cloud solutions are distinguished from hosted client-server products by a distributed delivery model, a multi-tenant solution that easily allows for frequent updates while providing full scalability and guaranteed service levels and up times. With a hosted solution the vendor controls the product from a hosted facility where such virtualization and scalability are not possible.”
The average contact center today runs a lot of applications. Workforce management and scheduling work in conjunction with a contact center platform for voice and other communications channels. Internal collaboration solutions, customer relationship management (CRM), call recording and quality monitoring, call routing and the interactive voice response (IVR), self-service solutions, stock and warehouse checking and back-office solutions may all be needed by the average contact center. Most organizations have a hard time coping with the costs of all these solutions in a premise-based model. From a budget perspective, this often causes them to skip vital functions in an effort to save money, and this does neither the contact center nor its customers any favors.
“For contact centers, regardless of size, cost is, perhaps, the most significant factor in technology purchases,” according to the white paper. “The savings accrued from avoiding investment in expensive servers (whether purchasing or leasing) is the most obvious advantage the cloud provides. But the server cost is not the only concern when a hardware infrastructure is built from scratch. Other items that may need to be purchased include a rack, a firewall, a load balancer, and a cooling system. To these must be added the costs of software licensing and storage.”
There is also a need for space, electricity, cooling and IT personnel to manage the complicated set-up. The costs and risks to the business of downtime and obsolescence are also significant, and the implementation times are often long and disruptive for premise-based solutions. True cloud solutions, on the other hand, can be up and running within a matter of days, and the IT headaches and time required for updates become someone else’s problem. A cloud service tailored precisely to customer needs can be seamlessly integrated into the existing enterprise IT infrastructure. Changes can be made quickly without business interruption, and overloading is never a concern as long as the system is managed properly. (This is why it’s vital to choose a cloud solution partner you trust and can work well with.)
The benefits to the contact center aren’t only monetary, however. Premise-based solutions require agents to be physically present near the equipment in order to work. Folding in other departments, such as sales and the back-office, because nearly impossible if they’re not located physically near the contact center. A cloud-based solution allows workers to interact with the contact center from the road, the warehouse, a remote office or even from their homes, which can be a compelling way to save even more money on call center operations. Thanks to the cloud model, small to mid-sized contact centers can now be highly competitive with larger organizations, offering the same high quality customer support and benefiting from advanced features, without a corresponding loss of capital.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi