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Cloud Services, SaaS Helping Businesses Affordably Meet Customer Service Level Goals

By Mae Kowalke
TMCnet Contributor

Technology is often touted for its potential ability to help businesses do more in less time at lower costs. Nowhere is this more pertinent than in the area of customer service.

In a recent TMCnet video interview, Craig Shambaugh, vice president at InVision Software (News - Alert), pointed out that the key to business success in a sluggish economy is maintaining customer service levels while keeping cost in mind.

To put it another way, businesses today are treading a fine line, needing to meet or exceed the expectations of customers at the most efficient staffing levels possible. Just how close to that edge a company can get before falling off the cliff depends on carefully chosen techniques and workforce management solutions.

For example, it helps to make sure customer service staff people take breaks at the right times, and that employees are included in the scheduling process. Simple things like these increase employee satisfaction by respecting the need to manage work-life balance, and ultimately result in higher customer service levels.

InVision Software is dedicated to helping businesses cost-effectively provide excellent customer service. The company offers workforce management solutions for a wide range of businesses, from small firms to large multi-nationals.

Shambaugh said many of InVision’s customers are moving toward hosted services like hosted VoIP. As they do this, they’re also interested in taking related applications and moving them out to the cloud. The software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)) model is definitely gaining traction.

InVision sits in a good spot as this trend picks up momentum because its solutions works just as well in the cloud as on-premise; it’s just a matter of customer preference how to deploy the applications. 

For 2011 and beyond, Shambaugh predicts SaaS will continue growing, and this will open opportunities in some new areas.

“Back-office scheduling is an area that most companies have not tackled yet,” he told TMCnet during the video interview. “There are better scheduling techniques that can be used, and a growing interest in that area.”

Cloud-based solutions also offer many benefits to businesses concerned both about growth and the bottom line.

“As cloud services get more robust, with the reliability companies are looking for, more and more businesses are going to shift that way,” Shambaugh said. “It takes a lot of burden out of the company, allows growth to be more reactionary to the market because you don’t need to make big capital investments in your own infrastructure.”

For more discussion about ways businesses can affordably meet their customer service goals and fun profitable operations, watch the full video interview.