Contact centers today stress on the use of hosted technologies for their call centers. In 2012, hosted solutions have gained prominence over other technologies. A hosted contact center solution is the ‘network-based’ service where a service provider owns and operates a contact center technology platform.
Since the inception, say about 15 years ago, hosted contact center solutions use to customize services to Small-to-Medium Businesses (SMBs). They were able to provide scaled-down features in exchange for convenience and low cost.
We do have cloud based contact center solution, but a new chapter has begun with the launch of better hosted offerings that have redefined the value proposition.
Over the years, vast differentiators have changed the character of hosted contact center technologies. They have introduced added features like the total-cost-of ownership, up-front investment, architecture and scale. It was in the early 2000s that the SMBs faced difficulty in choosing the right contact center technologies. At that time, PBX or premise-based solutions were a preferred choice. In 2005, cloud-based services do excelled above others, and the international market saw a immediate increase in sales.
Whereas the hosted solutions improved with advanced features like –
- Disaster Recovery
- Integration of At-Home or Remote Agents
- Automatic Upgrades
Despite these advantages, the function and the control portfolio remain far behind the premise-based options.
Now in 2013, business interest and supplier innovation combined to produce a significant growth in the Hosted services. A research done by Contactbabel, further confirms ACD has reached more than $330 million in 2010 and are expected to grow at a percentage of 13.2% to achieve $795.3 million by 2017. The significant growth is the biggest hinder for the success of hosted contact center solutions.
However, with the congregation of exclusive features, hosted solutions are providing 4 substantial benefits to the contact center owners and their clients. Even at Fusion CX, we use hosted solutions to promote advanced solution for our small and medium sized business clients.
4 hosted contact center features that will give you an edge over the competitors include:
1. Featured Functions
The hosted service provider offers unified agent desktop that allows agents to navigate billing systems, knowledge bases, and numerous products easily. The same way also allows utilizing faster, and flexible tools to determine pacing, set up campaigns, monitor agents and maximize the call center efficiency. They also share the rich data capturing and reporting features to track activities in real-time.
2. Continuous Business Flow
Contact center owners often face the problem of data loss and that a basic catastrophe. Even we at Fusion CX go through such situations as we have to maintain a large customer database. For the SMBs data loss and consumer privacy are common concerns, so at Fusion CX we do handle them carefully. A hosted service with the right vendor can have a stable business flow.
3. Flexibility
The primary advantage of the hosted solutions is the flexibility, which allows users to meet the changing needs. As the global contact center companies are becoming fragmented and location-agonistic, business is able to meet the diverging work flow model.
4. Hosted-to-Premise Migration
This is the significant potential shift in the contact center performance. Variety of changes is going to happen, and for that, companies must adopt hosted services to be cost-worthy, provide ongoing customer care, etc. Hosted contact center is slowly evolving as an out-of-the-box tool, to produce a sophisticated, enterprise-ready solution. Their feature functionality and flexibility are adding the future enhancements.
