Cloud vs Premises Contact Center Costs

Many very small businesses need nothing more than a local or toll free number to take customer calls. Medium and larger companies have a sufficient prospect and customer base that they no longer ask whoever is behind the counter to take the calls. They’ve specialized that function, installed dedicated technology and moved it into its own office space known as a contact center. There’s a certain cost associated with contact centers and it’s hard to reduce... or is it?

Up until recently, the only other option was to outsource the function on or off shore. Offshore contact or “call” centers have developed a tarnished reputation from overly ambitious efforts to recruit agents with weak English language skills and/or inadequate technical or procedural understanding. Companies now promote their in-house expert customer service staff as a competitive advantage.

But what about the costs? Is there any way to make in-house contact centers more competitively priced with shipping the function offshore? Fortunately, the answer is yes.

The way you can attack the cost monster is with a combination of lower capital and operating expenses plus productivity improvements. The tools to do that are the latest technology located in the cloud.

Traditional contact centers are what is known a premises-based. They’re either a department within your building or located in a facility by themselves. The technology is an in-house PBX phone system that manages all the agent phones and all the outside lines. Newer facilities may have an IP PBX phone system, which serves the same function but is easier to interface to computer systems so that agent’s screens can automatically display customer data in a “screen pop.”

PBX and IP PBX equipment is expensive to buy and costly to maintain. As these systems get older, technology passes them by and they don’t have all the latest features. It also gets harder to find replacement parts and even technicians who understand the nuances of that particular piece of equipment. Eventually, in frustration, capital is allocated to purchase a new system and the cycle starts all over.

The new alternative approach is outsourcing, but this time it’s the equipment not the agents. You keep the people you know and trust right where they are. What you unload is the infrastructure that doesn’t add value on its own. It’s just a tool, a means to an end. By using a cloud-based contact center solution all of the clap-trap moves “out there,” while you have the same or much better ability to serve your customers and sales prospects.

inContact is a trail-blazer in the new field of cloud-based contact centers. What they provide is infrastructure very much like cloud computing, except specialized for contact center operations. The core is a much more than a simple hosted PBX system. It performs that function, of course, to connect each agent telephone with a customer. That agent can be sitting at the desk they have now or pick up and move to another area, even be located at home where they join the operation on a part-time or full time basis. This alone gives you a flexibility to employ excellent prospects who can’t or won’t commute to your facility every day.

You probably realize that your current PBX system has a certain capacity. You have so many phones and so many phone lines. As soon as you get one too many callers, the system starts giving busy signals to the overflow. That means lost sales or irritated customers who are going to think twice about doing business with you again. The cloud system has an enormous capacity that you can tap on short notice. Do you have seasonal peaks in your business? No need to have extra capacity idling during the slow periods just so you can handle the rush. The cloud can scale up and down to meet your varying needs throughout the year.

Oh, but is the cloud as reliable as an in-house system? Probably more so. inContact offers a service level agreement of 99.99% availability through dual redundant data centers located in Dallas and Los Angeles. There are six layers of cloud security to ensure that your data stays private. Unlike other cloud service providers, inContact was a telecom carrier before they were a cloud company. That means they can also provide the highly reliable bandwidth you need to connect your agents to the system, with only one provider to deal with.

How much can you save? It varies, of course, but a recent study shows that total cost of ownership can be 30% less for a few as 50 seats and sliced by over 50% for a 500 seat contact center. Is that intriguing enough to get you interested in learning more and getting complete details on prices, cost savings and features? You may be shocked by what you are missing out on.

Quick Way to Cut the Corporate Phone Bill

With escalating commodity prices and surging fuel bills, many companies are in the big squeeze between rising costs and limited ability to raise prices. Things are moving so fast that it's hard to re-engineer or even rethink business strategy. The most viable solution to maintain profits is simply to cut costs.

At this point all the green eyeshades turn toward the phone bill. Are all those calls really necessary? Really?

Auditing the telecommunications bills is a smart move even when business is humming along smoothly. You can spot charges for unused or unneeded services that can be discontinued at a savings. Even a quick glance will reveal unusual activities such as a few employees who seem to hang on the phone all day making personal calls. But once you've picked the low hanging fruit, the job gets much harder and burns up a lot of time. Is there anything quicker?

Sure, just pay less.

That's right. The fastest way to cut your voice and data services bill is to simply pay less for exactly what you have now. If your telephone and Internet usage have grown along with your business, you might not have thought to challenge the increasing costs. After all, you are using more. But what's also changed over the years is the competitive landscape for digital voice and data. What was the best deal a few years ago may well be far more than you need to pay today.

But isn't finding vendors and going out for quotes even more time consuming than digging into the phone records?

It doesn't have to be. As a user, you're not really in a position to know where to look or how to evaluate the myriad of competitive options. But there is a professional service that will do this without charging you. It's a network of experienced telecom consultants connected through a sophisticated database system that lets them compare a dozen or more options for any given need. All you do is make a simple online or telephone inquiry and you'll get immediate attention.

Why is this likely to work for your business? Take telephone service, for instance. Your PBX telephone system likely uses or could use T1 PRI digital telephone trunking. This is the standard way to bring in multiple telephone lines to a centralized office phone system. T1 PRI pricing, including combinations of local, long distance, 800 numbers, DID (direct inward dialing) and Caller ID, is highly competitive. You may well be able to get the very same services you have now with the very same usage levels for a lower monthly bill.

The same is true for data services, such as dedicated Internet. In addition, the the standard T1 and DS3 Internet services, Ethernet connections have become available only recently. T1 and DS3 can be had for lower lease rates. If you can get Ethernet over copper or fiber connection, you'll save even more at higher bit rates.

Before you get too embroiled in cutting heads or making panic changes to your business processes, take a quick look at cutting your voice and data telecom expenses by simply paying less. You can do the hard stuff later.