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In this two part series we look at the inefficiencies of installing and maintaining an on-premises call center.
On-premises contact center solutions are not only expensive to install but also cumbersome to maintain. It requires large capital expenditure and ongoing operational costs. The architecture for a typical 100 seat call center resembles this:
Deployment
Deployment of components such as IVR, CTI and Recording require significant amount of investments in terms of time and resources. Typically these costs amount to 60% of the total setup cost. In the traditional architecture agents require multiple client software components, thus adding to the software costs.
Maintenance
In addition to all the hardware costs each component (IVR, CTI, Recording etc.) requires recurring hardware annual maintenance costs. An on-premises call center also needs multiple IT specialists for maintenance and support. Although server count can be reduced using virtualization the integration complexities remain constant.
Reliability
It is cost-prohibitive to include full redundancy and disaster recovery options. In most cases it involves duplicating components of the existing infrastructure thus not benefiting from economies of scale. Traditional call centers typically budget and plan for upgrade and maintenance projects that involve considerable system downtime.
Total Costs
When you add all these costs, the cost to setup and deploy a traditional 100 seat call center exceed $700K. Depending on the dynamics of the environment, annual support and maintenance costs quickly add up to $200K or more. For a mid-sized call center this cost is extremely difficult to justify and in most cases is a major barrier to entry.
In our next post we will compare the architecture of on-premises call center with a Hosted Call Center.
As always we are keen on hearing your thoughts.
If you watched any of the recent Winter Olympics in Vancouver, you saw athletes who adapted on the fly to courses and conditions that changed moment to moment.
Downhill skiers faced slalom courses that were soggy during their first run and icy the second time down. Biathletes with a clear shot at their first target had their visibility hampered by fog at the next. Agility and flexibility were the orders of the day to take home medals of any kind.
If you manage a call center you may have experienced similar changes in weather, seasonality, and the vagaries of the free market. If you use call center software that resides in the cloud-a virtual call center-you'll adapt as quickly as any gold medal winner in Vancouver.
Virtual call centers give businesses the flexibility and agility they need to adjust to all sorts of changes:
With a cloud-based call center, your team can bring home a medal no matter what the competition or the weather sends your way.
There's a reason your customers call you: They want to buy something; they want to ask you something; they need help with something they've bought from you.
Sometimes, you call your customers: You want to sell them something; you want to find out whether a payment is forthcoming; you want to be sure they're satisfied so they'll come back and buy from you again and again.
If these experiences leave your customers dissatisfied they'll quickly take their business to one of your competitors.
In other words, it's all about the relationship. Customer relationship management (CRM) is critical to the success of a call center.
That's one reason why a cloud-based call center is so appealing-it quickly, easily and fully integrates with your CRM applications such as Salesforce CRM or NetSuite.
With a single sign-on, your agents instantly get a 360-degree view of the customer they're connected to, whether by phone, email, or chat. They know who's calling, what they've bought, what issues have recently been resolved or are pending. It gives your team to power to handle their calls quickly, efficiently, and most of all: knowledgeably.
A future that's cloudy and bright
Ready or not, there's a cloud in your computing future. The analysts at Gartner put cloud computing at No. 1 on their Top 10 Strategic Technology Areas for Growth in 2010, putting it on a par with e-business a decade ago.
Those who are ready will leverage cloud computing's advantages, especially in their call centers.
Call center software applications delivered via the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model offer several benefits over their landlocked rivals:
All these factors enhance call agents' productivity thus decreasing customer frustration, ultimately improving customer satisfaction and your bottom line.
Suddenly, a cloudy future is a good thing.
What would you think if we told you that your call center no longer needs a "center?" That, to connect with your customers, your operations no longer need to be confined to a building? That, beyond a PC with a Web connection, and a telephone, you don't even need equipment to take your customers' calls? That all you really need are people.
Talking up value-for you and your customers
Traditionally, companies anchored their call center to buildings located far away from their headquarters and their customers. They had no choice. That was the safest place to put all the expensive hardware and software they just bought, and it was the easiest way to monitor their agents' performance. Plus they needed a location with access to inexpensive labor that could keep up with high agent attrition rates. They also didn't have the Internet and they didn't have VoIP or the latest in cutting-edge call center technology. But you do.
And so do we.
A call center unbound by physical constraints, a hosted, virtual call center delivered as a service shifts the call center paradigm dramatically. You can now tap into resources without being constrained by geography. Agents can be located anywhere - remote offices or working from their homes - yet they function seamlessly in the new virtual call center environment.
Now, you can deploy a state-of-the-art contact center in days, not months. You can integrate all your customer contacts-voice, email, chat. You can eliminate your investment in call center hardware and software almost entirely.
Of course the virtual call center includes all of the bells and whistles you'd expect - skill based routing, call center monitoring and call center recording is a breeze, and interactive voice response is right at your fingertips. Integrating your virtual call center with your CRM provides your agents a 360-degree view of your customers in real-time. Because this is a virtual call center, you have on-demand provisioning to facilitate rapid configuration changes as your business evolves.
No more lost calls, no busy signals, no ignored emails. The end of multiple inquiries to resolve a single issue is at hand. Happy agents and satisfied customers.
Traditions are nice for holiday gatherings, not businesses facing stiff competition and an even stiffer economy. If a call center, or a call center upgrade, is in your future, don't get mired in the past.
You may think us a bit strange, but we dream about call centers.
We wonder what call centers will be like in 2020. We fantasize about a customer service paradise where there are no more lost calls, busy signals, or ignored emails. And, in our dreams, it never requires multiple inquiries to resolve an issue.
You get the idea: We're crazy about call centers. Traditional ones, virtual ones, hosted ones, and of course, the really spiffy, twenty-first century SaaS ones-contact centers that fuse phone, email, and chat. (We get that last one a lot in our Trekkie dreams.)
So, we decided to start this blog and flaunt our zeal for software that rethinks, reshapes, and redefines the status quo in call centers.
And, whether you're a seasoned veteran who wants to explore the value of virtual call centers or someone new to the brave, new world of Web-based call centers, we'd like our blog to become a resource for you; someplace to explore the latest trends in call center technology, somewhere to turn for insightful thought-leadership, a place where people gather to share tips and tricks you can use every day to improve your call center's performance.
In the weeks and months ahead, we want to share our vision for how to deploy virtual call centers (We actually want to take the "center" out of the picture entirely!); we want to show you how SaaS-based services mesh seamlessly with third-party applications and how to use software to easily and cost-effectively augment your existing infrastructure.
So, let us know what you think... and if you run into Dr. Freud, let's just keep the whole call center fantasy thing to ourselves, ok?