Outbound Call Center Featured Article

Why Are On-Demand Contact Centers Becoming More Popular?

By Linda Dobel
TMCnet Contributor

Companies that regularly attend industry gatherings and stay abreast of what the trades as well as mainstream news sources are reporting know that on-demand contact center solutions have received growing attention. The more clear this becomes, the more the answer everyone is looking for is, of course, why is this concept so popular?

There are a number of answers.

The most widely publicized benefit of on-demand contact center solutions is cost savings. Premise-base systems represent a capital expense while the pay-per-use model (on-demand) “can be the foundation of a compelling return on investment (ROI) for deploying a hosted contact center model,” according to VoltDelta (News - Alert). 

Scalability is another draw to on-demand contact center solutions. To ensure that they will be able to meet peak call volume demands, contact centers that choose the traditional on-premise model need to spend extra money to install a system that may remain idle most of the time. On the other hand, the hosted (on-demand) model can instantly react to fluctuating call volumes without added expense.  

Not only can the on-demand solution react to ever-changing call volumes, but it can provide a rich feature set that will enable superior user-customer interactions. CRM integration, rich agent desktops and multichannel contact are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to features readily available with a hosted solution because the hosted solution is designed as a consolidated entity with features that will keep pace with a business’ changing customer-handling needs.

The growing popularity of on-demand contact center solutions is also attributable to cost and management savings when it comes to IT. Since engineering and network management support is provided by the outsource company, as are updates associated with the general platform, those costs and headaches are eliminated.

Coming full circle, a number of companies that have embraced the on-demand contact center model have done so because they struggled with legacy systems from multiple vendors that reached the end of their life stage or became disenchanted with a vendor that was sluggish in delivering upgrades. With a virtual model, those issues don’t exist. Companies that have taken the leap to the virtual contact center model enjoy the fact that all sites and home agents are consolidated under the umbrella of a single system, utilizing IP and if necessary TDM access as the lowest common denominator. They also are pleased with the fact that they can retain their local telephone number as well as use a common toll-free number for all of their locations.  

In short, companies are discovering that because a central call queue independent of physical agent location means call handling can be optimized regardless of whether an agent is located in another time zone, country or in the home, along with all of the other reasons cited, it is understandable why the impressive growth of hosted contact centers has been cited by so many analysts.