Cloud Contact Center Solutions – Early Innovation

Cloud is sometimes touted as the panacea for all known corporate IT ills. Reduce in-house infrastructure costs; only pay for what you use; take advantage of redundant infrastructure without location costs. What’s not to love?

If you’ve ever deployed a contact center solution in the cloud you might have a different view. The concept is great, but in contact center space, there are some real challenges. Let’s consider the two most common approaches..

New Entrants: You take a simple service from a dedicated cloud telephony service provider and try to add all the bits you need to make a fully functioning contact center.

Legacy Transformation: Take a ‘cloud’ offering from an established vendor and try to make it fit your business.

Both these approaches have their drawbacks, and here is why:

New Entrants tend to offer simple baseline functionality as by keeping the ACD model simple and stateless, in keeping with sound cloud philosophy, it facilitates scale and reliability. But what follows then is a need to buy-in and integrate with a range of third-party cloud components in order to provide an effective solution. This requires remarkable technical dexterity and a control on costs which are more than challenging. You’ll get a product that works after a fashion but whether you can control your costs so as to sell at a reasonable price are debatable. Some of the early hosted offerings that have bitten the dust, have failed for just these reasons.

The Legacy approach potentially gives you a functionally rich contact center solution but it too comes at a price. Established vendors generally package their existing product for cloud, meaning large VMs using dedicated resources, high operating costs and no linear scaling. Add to this the need to integrate the platform to your business and the costs start to look ugly.

The question one has to ask is: can you get a cloud contact center solution that delivers rich multisession ACD functionality, media integration for chat, email and other channels without integration effort? Moreover, can such a solution work effectively with cloud computing models to ensure that infrastructure costs are minimised?

There are no short cuts to an efficient affordable cloud solution for contact centres. Next month we will share our approach with you, which tackles these challenges head-on.