Making investments in technology is a challenge for any organization. The barriers tend to center on selecting the right technology to meet the need and understanding the total cost of ownership. Once you’ve worked out these details and know the direction you want to go, how do you select  a provider you can trust to support you in making the change and driving performance in the future?

These are common questions when looking to cloud-based technologies. Most of us have read and heard the promised benefits, but does the marketing hype apply in all environments? How do you separate the market leaders from those who are here today and gone tomorrow? How do you know for sure that the hosted contact center will truly deliver what you need to drive the customer experience?

The reality is that technology, when selected according to your needs, can provide a competitive advantage. You may be considering the hosted contact center in an effort to improve agility and reduce your IT and equipment requirements. When applications are hosted in a secure data center maintained by a prove service provider and delivered through an easy-to-use service suite, you truly can see the benefits to your bottom line.

When you leverage a call center solution in the cloud, you gain the ability to perform better product support, collect payments, answer inquiries and complete sales through channels that may have been out of reach in the past. Plus, you gain the opportunity to compete on the same level as the big boys as you benefit from economies of scale.

By leveraging the hosted contact center, you use the Internet to capture enterprise-level strength, reliability and security without the cost of building out the physical center. You also don’t have the bear the burden of building the infrastructure, selecting the PBX (News - Alert) or hiring the IT team to manage it on a daily basis. From the outside, however, you look just like your giant competitor who has to manage all of these elements in-house and must claim a significant share of the market to compete with you on cost.

Your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is also lower than the traditional build-out as you don’t have to put up large capital investments or support the ongoing management and maintenance of the in-house system. There is no switching equipment required as the virtual call center isn’t involved in the media path and capacity and users can easily be scaled according to needs.  

If you’re already using unified communications to streamline your connections, the hosted contact center is designed to integrate easily into your environment. The VoIP technology used will easily synthesize chat, voice, video and screen sharing into the unified communications experience, allowing for the seamless experience across the enterprise and applications.

The promises continue to prove true in hosted contact center deployments. Do your due diligence to check out providers. Build your needs list and ask for references. Those who have had happy customers for years are those best suited to meet your needs today and in the future.