When the telecommunications company Alcatel-Lucent started entrepreneur boot camps for its employees several years ago, it insisted that participants form teams including experts in engineering, research, finance, marketing and sales. The reason? Company leaders recognized that a variety of skills are vital to taking an idea from inception to a commercialized product — or even to a spinoff company — and that one individual rarely has all of those skills. Success, they believe, comes through assembling teams of specialists.

Contact centers of all sizes devote their best efforts to offer excellent services to their customers, in order to win their trust that ensures the success of contact centers in return. Still, due to the recent economic upheavals and the overall volatility of the telecommunications manufacturing sector, the contact centers that own outdated or non-upgradeable premises-based equipment have to make a vital decision, whether they make significant new capital expenditures or keep ready to face declines in performance impacting the customers.