Call centers worldwide are moving to SaaS (hosted) call center platforms at a rapid pace.  Some studies have predicted that up to 70% of contact centers will be using a hosted platform by 2014.  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 soft phone, 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, coach agents and can communicate with agents via chat.

If a call center wishes to run seasonal campaigns that will require additional agents, there is no need to invest in additional infrastructure if they opt to use a hosted platform.  Hosted platforms tend to be “pay as you go”, have unlimited scalability and allow an organization to add and remove seats as needed.

Free Upgrades
When a hosted call center platform provider in a multitenant environment upgrades or improves their platform, all of the customers reap the benefits at no additional cost.  Based on customer feedback, hosted 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 halt because of the 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 login from home and would not have had to experience any days without productivity.

Hosted providers offer both platform redundancy, carrier redundancy so that there is no single point of failure and better than five 9’s of uptime.

More Efficient Call Routing
Several providers of hosted solutions provide a solution called Cloud Routing which is 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 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 does not matter what kind of equipment your remote contact centers use. You can monitor agents, generate reports, and view real-time telephony just as you would if you were sending calls to your own inbound queues.  Choose between “round robin” to distribute calls evenly between agents across multiple centers, “sequential” to fill the first center up and then overflow to the next, “percent allocation” to indicate the percent of calls going to each call center, or “geo routing” to dynamically send your callers to the call center nearest them.

Better ROI/TCO
Let’s say you are 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 all the 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.  You then will have an expensive maintenance agreement and will have to hire a team to manage all of this equipment.  You will 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 or hosted call center platform, the capital expenditure to get started 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 the 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.

On a recent LinkedIn poll asking the question “What is the estimated savings on a Virtual Call Center Platform to your organization?” here are the results of those polled:

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

SOURCE: Managedserviceproviders.biz