Hosted contact centres bring numerous benefits that help businesses meet their requirements, but there are some pros and cons that should be taken into account.
This is according to the MD of Spescom DataFusion, Paul Fick, who says the best approach to hosted contact centres, is engaging with a trusted technology partner to conduct proper user requirement analysis, solution scoping, as well as a business case to determine the best approach in every case.
He says hosted solution offerings are being hotly debated by the contact centre industry as more big players like Telkom and Vodacom begin to offer these services.
”With uptake mostly at the low-end of the market like among smaller players, the question is whether a hosted contact centre solution makes business sense.”
A hosted solution is one where the host or service provider acquires and maintains the underlying technology platform, providing the service to multiple users, he explains.
“Thus, a company that wants to staff and operate a call centre for its customers. To call in to, but doesn't want to incur the upfront investment in a telephony platform with all the bells and whistles such as recording, automated call distribution, analysis, etc., may find a hosted solution ideal."
According to Fick, there are numerous benefits of hosted call centres. "Cloud computing, which is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet, has three distinct characteristics.
“It is provided 'on demand', is flexible (a user can have as much or as little of the service as they want) and the service is fully managed by the provider,” he points out.
Fick says this alone offers considerable advantages since, in this model, there is no need for a large initial capital outlay, no licensing fees required, no costly updates to the platform , and no technology maintenance costs.
"Add to this is the fact that the small contact centre operation can, with a hosted offering, access sophisticated functionality that only larger entities could previously afford, he says.
“Hosting allows the operation to scale quickly as demand changes as the hosted provider will typically provide technology by the agent, by function or by the month; and costs remain predictable,” he adds.
There are a number of things to consider when deciding on the deployment of a contact centre using a hosted solution, he advises.
"Larger organisations, such as banks and insurance companies, see their contact centres as mission-critical and, therefore, want to own their own infrastructure," notes Fick.
He adds that hosting is often more appropriate for smaller organisations, yet there are questions about security, the dependence on connectivity to the hosted provider to offer the service.
“And questions about how such an organisation would function in the event that disaster recovery became necessary," he adds.
Fick believes that while current average per user cost from the larger hosted providers differ, they remain slightly more expensive than the per user cost of owning and running the full platform.
These costs may well drop as uptake increases. “However, the benefits are clear, even now. It depends very much on your business needs," says Fick.
His advice to customers is to not discount hosting - as the adoption of cloud computing and hosted services increases, a sweet spot in terms of cost, functionality and returns will be found.
“We do, however, suggest that anyone considering a hosted contact centre solution be sure to cover their bases in terms of securing customer data and transaction records."
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