Top 5 Reasons Contact Centers are Moving to Cloud-Based Call Center Platforms

by Marketing @Connect First
April 27, 2017

Call centers worldwide are moving to SaaS (hosted) call center platforms at a rapid pace. Why are so many companies moving away from owning and managing equipment onsite and moving to 'The Cloud'? Below are the top five reasons.

Versatility/Scalability
Hosted platforms provide a universal call center solution that unites multiple centers and work from home agents. In the hosted environment, it doesn't matter where the agents are located, whether they be in a brick and mortar call center or working from home. Hosted platforms also tend to be connectivity-agnostic, so the agents can be connected via VoIP or PSTN and can utilize a softphone, IP phone, analog phone, or a cell phone.

With a hosted platform, managers can login from any browser and see all of their agents' activity in real time (regardless of location), monitor calls, and coach agents.

If a call center wishes to run seasonal campaigns that will require additional agents, there's no need to invest in additional infrastructure if they opt to use a hosted platform. Hosted platforms tend to have a 'pay as you go' fee structure, along with unlimited scalability and the ability to add and remove seats as needed.

Free Upgrades
When a hosted call center platform provider in a multi-tenant environment upgrades or improves their platform, all of the customers reap the benefits at no additional cost. Based on customer feedback, cloud based call center providers are constantly improving their platforms and adding new features. More often than not, there is no additional cost for the added features and functionality.

Business Continuity
In the month of December, multiple contact centers in the Northeastern United States were closed for several days due to severe weather conditions. What was the cost of having their inbound queues and outbound campaigns come to a complete halt due to inclement weather? If those same centers were utilizing a hosted platform as either their primary call center platform or as a back-up, they could have easily had their agents log in from home, and they wouldn't have had to experience any days without productivity.

Hosted providers offer both platform redundancy and carrier redundancy, so that there is no single point of failure, and any call center software solution worth its salt will provide better than five 9's of uptime.

*A more detailed description of the Business Continuity benefits of hosted call center platforms can be viewed at Managed Service Providers.biz: Benefits of Cloud Routing.

More Efficient Call Routing
Several providers of hosted solutions provide a solution called Cloud Routing, which is essentially a unified 'queue in the cloud.' Cloud Routing lets you use the internet to route your inbound calls between one or more remote call centers. With cloud routing, an internet connection and a browser are all you need to create a virtual 'queue in the cloud'. Whether used to extend your existing call center capacity, or to manage all of your inbound call traffic, cloud routing makes it easy to quickly and flexibly scale up and down as your call volume fluctuates. Cloud routing is destination-agnostic, so it doesn't matter what kind of equipment your remote contact centers use. You can monitor agents, generate reports, and view real-time telephony details just as you would if you were sending calls to your own inbound queues. Choose a 'round robin' functionality to distribute calls evenly between agents across multiple centers, or use a 'sequential' approach to fill the first center up and then overflow to the next. 'Percent allocation' will indicate the percent of calls going to each call center, and 'geo routing' will dynamically send your callers to the call center nearest them.

Better ROI/TCO
Let's say you're building a 100-seat call center. If you went the traditional route, you would purchase a PBX, a dialer, and all the bolt-ons to give you call recording and any additional functionality you will require. On the low end, you might spend a quarter of a million dollars for this equipment. For 'best of breed' equipment, you might have a capital expenditure of up to two million dollars. Next, you'll shell out more for an expensive maintenance agreement, along with the team you will of course have to hire to manage all of this equipment. You'll also be limited by your number of ports, and adding additional agents as you grow will require an additional capital expenditure for licenses and equipment.

With a SaaS (hosted) call center platform, the capital expenditure to get up and running is minimal, perhaps only a few thousand dollars. While you can use VoIP or PSTN, most opt to use VoIP, which can increase efficiency and lower long-term costs. You pay a reasonable license fee per agent or seat (average cost is $100 per month) and a low per-minute rate. There's no expensive equipment to manage and maintain, and your call center can be easily managed by one or two individuals. Instead of owning and managing equipment that is not redundant, expensive, and will eventually need to be replaced, you can connect to a private cloud where you have your Virtual ACD, Virtual Predictive Dialer, Cloud Routing, Call Recording, Real-Time Reporting, and much more, all in one place.

We'll leave you with one last thought. A recent LinkedIn poll that asked "What is the estimated savings on a Virtual Call Center Platform to your organization?" yielded the following results:

35% of those polled - savings of 25%
32% of those polled - savings of 10%
18% of those polled - savings of 40%
10% of those polled - savings of over 50%

Ready to start saving? Contact Connect First today to learn how your contact center can benefit from an effortless move to the cloud.

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