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Navigating the Wilderness of On-Demand Contact Center Solutions: Busting the Myths

By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor

Everyone knows by now the benefits of on-demand solutions for the contact center: the ability to get up and running quickly with low upfront capital investment, flexible scalability for contact centers with fluctuating needs, the ability to support home-based and remote agents, and the ability to put the IT needs of the contact center into someone else's hands. But the on-demand contact center solutions market is beginning to become a little crowded, and sometimes it's hard to hear clearly over all the chatter. A new white paper by on-demand contact center solutions provider VoltDelta (News - Alert) called “Trust But Verify...” seeks to help clear the path by busting the 10 most common myths about on-demand contact center solutions.

For starters, many on-demand contact center solutions providers claim to offer a complete solution, but some components may not be native: more often than not, the speech recognition component is the result of a partnership with a voice company, and the call recording component is also often courtesy of another company and cobbled onto the original on-demand product. Though complete integration is usually promised by the vendor, this is often not the case.

Another area to check, as many on-demand providers fall down here, is with the integration between live agents and automated systems. This is critical for companies that use a mix of both live agents and voice systems to serve customers, sometimes on the same calls. To get the best integration possible, look for CTI (News - Alert) integration and call recording technology that efficiently extends a call from voice recognition to an agent. Ask the vendor for specific examples where callers are not required to repeat details when an IVR transfers to an agent – a common source of frustration for callers.

Other areas in which many on-demand contact center solutions lack robust feature sets is with true skills-based routing, integration between inbound and outbound, cloud-based queue management (the ability to move calls easily between agents and queue groups for the purpose of load-balancing, and coverage for international calls.

The better you can navigate the wilderness that is today's array of on-demand solutions for your contact center, the better you can begin serving your customers.

To read the full white paper, visit http://www.tmcnet.com/tmc/whitepapers/white-paper.aspx?id=2979&title=1%29%09TRUST+but+VERIFY.........+The+10+Myths+of+Contact+Center+OnDemand+Messages