Today, more and more IT departments consider on-demand technology both as a viable alternative to premise-based solutions and an important tool to gain competitive advantage. Organizations in hundreds of industries have adopted on-demand solutions and experienced greater flexibility and lower upfront and ongoing costs.

In the call center world, on-demand solutions can be an attractive alternative to the traditional choice of investing in costly software, hardware and services needed to build and maintain a premise-based call center.

To effectively evaluate the on-demand call center model and its fit within your organization, consider the following.

On-Demand Solutions Can Reduce Costs

The most obvious cost savings from on-demand call center solutions is the elimination of initial investments in hardware, software and other equipment, as well as the ongoing license maintenance costs that are needed with an on-premise call center.

In fact, if your company spends more than $250 per agent per year on technology license maintenance (i.e. more than $25,000 per year for a 100-agent deployment), you most likely can justify a move to an on-demand solution through maintenance fee savings alone.

A hosted on-demand solution typically represents only a fraction of the cost it takes to build and maintain a premise-based contact center solution. Comparing the costs over three to five years will still favor hosting, with the cost of IT personnel being a major differentiator.

More importantly, using an on-demand provider that delivers a fully integrated platform of inbound and outbound contact center solutions on a “per user, per month” subscription basis ensures that you pay only for what you need, and only for what you use.

On-Demand Solutions Can “Buy” You More for Your Dollar

With an on-demand system, you can future-proof your business and leverage the vendor’s investment in ongoing innovation without the cost and disruption of physical software and hardware upgrades. An appropriate service integration platform will give you the flexibility to add new features as easily as flipping a switch.

If your on-demand provider offers a fully packaged solution, or access to other services through its partnerships with other technology vendors, you will have more sophisticated technology at your disposal than would be cost-effective to install and support on your own.

To save on integration costs, look for a vendor that has partnerships with key routing infrastructure, telecommunications, CRM and other technology companies to ensure rapid and cost-effective delivery of an integrated solution. Ask them how long a typical implementation takes.

Nothing drives ROI metrics like scale and expertise. Look for on-demand providers that own and operate their own secure data centers. Ask if their facilities are SAS70 certified, and if they manage the entire contact center infrastructure from their facilities. By doing so, they provide you with cost, capability and reliability levels that no premise-based system can match.

On-Demand Solutions Enable Consolidation

Rather than implement or subscribe to different solutions for each type of customer contact, look for an on-demand vendor that offers integrated access to multiple contact channels, i.e. voice, email, web chat and fax. Providing agents with integrated access to all communications channels can reduce the need for multiple agent teams to learn and use different applications.

A common interface with integrated data from relevant applications—along with automated outbound dialing, synchronized screen pops, dynamic agent scripting and call routing technologies—can further enable call center agents to more rapidly handle and escalate customer requests.

Increased call center productivity and flexibility enables call center managers to effectively handle more interactions faster, so they can support growth in call center interactions without the need to incur additional costs. Typically, companies are able to handle higher volumes of customer contacts with reduced call center staff by consolidating the call center agents and electronic communication agents into one team. Integrating multiple contact channels also provides managers with improved visibility and consistent reporting.

For example, a customer of ours in the tourism industry replaced its premise-based contact center solution with an on-demand system that included multiple channel communication. They dramatically reduced their ongoing contact center management costs, improved agent workflow and were able to handle a significantly greater number of reservations, while achieving an ROI of 300 percent and a payback in only two months.

On-Demand Solutions Enable Flexibility and Cost Savings in Call Center Staffing

The number of agents you need can change at any time. A special promotion, seasonal spikes in your business, or any number of other events could leave you with unacceptable customer delays—causing irreparable damage to your customer service levels and reputation. On-demand solutions are highly scalable and can eliminate this concern: new seats can be added quickly and easily, all without having to install new hardware and software.

On-demand solutions also eliminate over- and under-capacity. Once you buy a premise-based contact center, you’re locked in to the number of available agents. Even if everything goes according to plan, you likely have bought too much capacity at the beginning of your usage cycle, and will be struggling with too little capacity at the end. With an on-demand hosted solution model, you receive exactly the capacity you need, exactly when you need it, every single day.

Because on-demand solutions are often web-based and can be accessed from any web browser, they also promote flexible staffing arrangements. Managers can deploy remote call center agents regardless of their location, resulting in salary and overhead cost savings.

In addition, since these agents don’t have to work in the same physical location, companies can offer flexible or part-time hiring options. Ideally, your on-demand call center should be able to accommodate and manage any combination of call agents, whether they are working in a single office, spread across multiple offices, and include remote agents working from home.

On-Demand Solutions Can Improve Customer Satisfaction and Improve your Top and Bottom Line

The number one benefit our customers rave about is improved customer service, which ultimately is a key goal for any call or contact center. With on-demand call centers, abandoned calls and customer wait times are reduced dramatically and customer issues are resolved faster. This has a direct impact on our customers’ top and bottom lines.

ROI is important to every contact center purchase decision. Whether you currently use a call center or are considering one, you should investigate the potential ROI from moving to an on-demand contact center provider. In the right situation, an on-demand solution goes beyond cutting costs and can add significant contributions to overall improvements in business performance.

For more information about on-demand solutions in the call center industry, see the following July, 2006 articles from Nucleus Research:

Vincent Deschamps is CEO at Echopass Corporation, the experts in on-demand, always-on, end-to-end, multi-site call and contact center services. Prior to Echopass, Deschamps successfully developed and carried out strategic business development and go-to-market plans and led sales efforts at several of America's leading telecommunications and hosted services companies, including Avaya (News - Alert) and AccessLine. Please visit Echopass at www.echopass.com. Vincent Deschamps can be reached at vincentdeschamps@echopass.com.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]

Discussions: