Hosted Call Center Featured Article

LiveOps on Hosted vs. On-Premises Solutions

By Brendan B. Read
Senior Contributing Editor

The next fiscal year begins in less than two months for many organizations, and they are figuring out how best in today’s still-challenging economic climate to provide customer-retaining/attracting quality service while decreasing costs and improving the bottom line. 

This decision making includes examining investing in the right contact center solutions that will help them deliver the results they are seeking. That choice, though, has become more complex because there is not only an analysis that must be made of what types of products are needed but also on how they are provided: via on-premises licenses or hosted aka cloud, software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)) either by the OEMs or by third parties -- and each method has their benefits and challenges.

To supply answers that can help firms in selecting the best contact center solutions, TMCnet is reaching out to leading suppliers to get their viewpoints. Paul Lang (News - Alert), who is senior vice president of product management and marketing for LiveOps answers our questions:

TMCnet: Compare and contrast (a) the benefits and (b) the challenges of hosted and premise-installed solutions

PL: BENEFITS: When considering the benefits that a cloud computing-based contact center model brings, it’s no wonder Gartner (News - Alert) predicts that at least 75 percent of customer contact centers will use a form of SaaS in their operations by 2013.

There are several primary benefits gained in extending capabilities from on-premise contact centers to cloud computing. These include:

• More scalability to easily and quickly manage peaks and valleys in call volume;
• Lower agent attrition and a larger and more diverse talent pool;
• Simplified IT requirements;
• Greater visibility and control to ensure efficient operations and agent effectiveness;
• Reduced labor and building maintenance costs, greater business agility and flexibility, and a more “eco-friendly” contact center platform.
• In addition, hosted solutions are continually innovating in the market, are always current and giving customers the choice to move at their own pace.

CHALLENGES: Shifting from an on-premise to hosted contact center solution requires some learning as far as best practices and processes go, as business managers must get accustomed to an entirely new format. For example, no longer is there a need to run a “data closet” to make sure the lights are on, or coordinate a team of IT experts to make a simple routing change.

The real challenge in shifting to a cloud computing-based contact center model comes in learning new ways to manage, encourage and train your teams especially with home-based remote agents. No longer able to walk the halls to measure your “perception” of progress, business managers need to adopt new ways to maintain and heighten the level of oversight for remote agents virtually. As such, managers will need new checks and balances to remotely train, oversee and monitor agents (as they can no longer walk the floor to listen in on calls, answer questions and mentor them in-person). In addition, to maintain high levels of customer service, you will need to use different types of key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor the agents, and to provide them with an incentive to perform their best. Finally, when working with remote agents it’s imperative to proactively set up security processes to maintain a secure IT environment that protects customer and company data – even as agents work from their homes.

Just with any move to a new platform you do need to consider security, integration with existing applications, the maturity and unification of feature sets and the deployment flexibility to support gradual innovation. Not all on-demand technologies are the same so you do need to do your homework.

TMCnet: For what contact center functions, e.g. sales, lead generation, market research, customer service, tech support, collections and for what size of contact centers and organizations are hosted solutions are ideal for? Which ones should consider having their solutions delivered on-premises?

PL: All functions that make up a contact center solution are and can be hosted or more specifically cloud-based. This includes the meeting and greeting performed in the IVR system, selecting and routing calls/contact to the right agent with skills or performance-based routing with or without a screen-pop, monitoring activity in real-time, and call recording and then evaluation of calls and call records after the event.

TMCnet: What technology applications are best suited for hosting and which ones should be premise-installed and why?

PL: In the contact center, with Web-based technology as the foundation, all applications can be deployed as on-demand platforms from the cloud. Whether it is call routing with self and/or assisted service, recording and reporting through to in-depth analytics, there are no real limitations to hosting. Bandwidth is ubiquitous, scale and security concerns have been addressed, and cloud-based applications have all of the necessary applications and tools to get the job done with a powerful simplicity of use.

TMCnet: Outline the advantages and downsides of OEM-hosted versus third-party-hosted solutions.

PL: THIRD-PARTY HOSTED SOLUTIONS:

• With third-party hosted solutions, “technology innovation” is almost an obsolete term; the pace of innovation is the same as on-premise solutions, namely slow;
• Due to multiple code bases, the technology is always behind the pace compared to other solutions in the industry;
• Feature over-bloat;
• Implementation occurs at a slower rate, generally taking six or more months;
• Each deployment requires expensive process, verification, and audits, with changes often needed for hardware and foundation software (OS and database);
• Heavy IT staff is required for costly implementation and maintenance.

SaaS/cloud-based solutions:

• Always current with the latest and greatest updates being rolled out frequently;
• A single code base enables seamless upgrades;
• Implementation can be possible in just days;
• Faster time to market;
• Business users can make updates directly.
• As a SaaS provider, 99.99 percent is the price of admission
• Multicarrier redundancy is inherent
• In most cases, such as with LiveOps, PCI Level 1 and HIPPA compliant & SAS (News - Alert) 70 certified data centers; 1024-bit RSA encrypted DB