Telecom as a Service or Cloud Call Centers

Telecom infrastructure management and administration take much time and resources and eventually become a burden of IT departments. For years IT executives tried to push it out of IT departments into Operations or even Finance. Why? Because it was not “cool” enough, consumed a ton of time and at the end of the day it was just something that allowed people to make phone calls and receive voice-mails. It was simply not challenging enough for IT folks.

I am not going to get into nitty-gritty of the call center technology evolution including recently gained popularity of VoIP, even though certain time periods are note worthy. I am sure that by now you have heard of call center solutions by AVAYA, Nortel and Cisco. 

Today, I would like to touch on hosted call center technology and its business benefits. While economic conditions are tough, achievement of cost savings are top priority for IT departments. However, at times, we must look beyond immediate savings. We call it “strategic vision”. For example, by implementing a new system you may be able to support the reduction of head-count within a call-center. How? By providing your business with the right set of tools, and making your existing call center agents more efficient through an improved process.

While many organizations are on top of their game when it comes to the call center infrastructure and processes, others are still way behind struggling with antiquated technologies and inefficient processes. By the way, in many cases process is much more important than the supporting technology, and unfortunately, some IT managers tend to overlook that. What your business needs is a sharp process and the kind of technology that is flexible enough to support ever changing marketplace and economic conditions.

The overall impression however is that you can’t be efficient unless you employ the right monitoring and reporting tools, meaning that you are in the know when it comes to your call center operation. Knowing how much time your agents spent on the phone with your clients is merely not enough. You must ensure that you deliver quality service thus retaining and growing your customer base.

Would you like to implement a magic telecom solution for your business? One of the best kept secrets is fully hosted call center solutions that so far were utilized predominantly by large enterprises as either a primary platform, or as a fail-over. Why? Because it was not affordable, demanded a lot of dedicated bandwidth, offered complex SLAs etc.

Over the years, hosted call center solutions have become a great alternative to an on-premise infrastructure that at times demands much maintenance and support, not to mention frequent upgrades. In an ideal world, if you company is constantly growing, an on-premise based call center solution may be a great fit. The reality is that while it is important to have the ability to scale up, it is also important to be able to scale down as needed. System’s flexibility is a competitive advantage of its own. In that respect, hosted call center solution becomes attractive to the SMBs, and even large enterprises.

One of the key advantages of hosted call center solutions is that they do not require any special hardware, software, or communications lines. For example, if you have several remote / home office based agents with access to basic PBX / home phone or even cell phone, DSL service, standard handsets and a computer with the Internet browser, you have everything required to take advantage of the hosted call center solution. The only other prerequisite is at least one DID per agent, meaning that an agent must have a number that can be dialed from outside reaching his handset directly, no extensions. In order to log into the queue and take calls, an agent simply navigates the browser to a website and logs on using a phone number. That’s it – your agent is up and running. From that point on you can monitor your agent activities and even listen-in for training purposes.  

While contracts with the hosted call center providers are always subject to negotiations, in general, any business is able to negotiate based upon minimum number of users. For example, if you have a 50-agent virtual call center, in order to get proof of concept, you may want to start with a small pilot of let’s say 5 agents, whereby you only commit to 10 agents for the length of the contract when you are ready to sign it, and can increase the number of concurrent licenses as needed. But, if you have to reduce the head-count for any reason, you do not over commit while maintaining predictable costing model benefiting your business.

While negotiating, beware of the fact that almost every service provider may offer you a utility model that may make sense at the time. The utility model generally include by the minute billing when an agent is on the phone with a client. While the utility model may work for some companies, it may not be feasible for others. Remember, before you commit to anything, know your numbers.

Until next time,

The Driz Group