• Hosted Call Center
• Articles

Cloud-Based Contact Centers are Fluid, No Matter What They Say

By Linda Dobel, TMCnet Contributor

With all of the publicity and articles recently written about cloud communications and its application in the contact center, it’s hard to believe that some people would come away with the completely opposite message about one of the greatest benefits of cloud communications—the ability to quickly, easily and inexpensively have access to all of the bells and whistles of a fully outfitted, customized contact center. But apparently that is so.

 In a blog posthttp://blog.incontact.com/blog/kevin-jensen/fluid-or-rock-customizing-cloud by Kevin Jensen, who is director of Professional Services - Business Consulting at inContact, Jensen says that he learned that this is indeed the perception some people have of cloud-based contact center solutions. Since inContact is a top-tier provider of on-demand call center software and call center agent optimization tools, we can assume that he is a person with his finger on the pulse of the industry, and therefore there’s credibility to what he’s written.

Hopefully, the people in question who don’t realize that cloud-based contact center solutions provide the ability to easily customize all aspects of the center will either be reading the original blog or this post because they could benefit from the analogy Jensen drew to make the reality of cloud-based contact centers  clear. Jensen wrote that their perception is “somewhat like saying that a rock is more fluid than water.” 

He went on to discuss the fluidity of the cloud-based contact center model. For example, he brought up the fact that additional ports can be added to a cloud-based contact center operation without that operation having to foot the bill for new hardware or worry about having the new hardware fit with the existing hardware. He also mentioned that adding ports can be accomplished as often as desired, which is not the case with the premise-based contact center model.   Clearly the premise-based contact center is the rock in this example and the cloud-based center is the water.

Like water that doesn’t conform to a predetermined shape, the cloud-based contact center solution can be customized “with minimal capital expenditure” to take any form the operation needs, meaning robust applications such as IVR, CTI (News - Alert) interface, ACD, reporting engine, dialer, and so on can be accessed by the operation immediately instead of, as Jensen put it “having to install separate ‘boxes.’”  He also cited the fact that it would probably be impossible in a premise based contact center to have an “enterprise GUI-based scripting tool [that] provides hundreds of various actions that can be taken on all multiple contact channels (voice, chat, e-mail, fax, etc.)” within one tool.