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Hosted Technology

Hosted Model is a well accepted trend made efficient by transforming contact centers to become IP centric. By utilizing a converged voice and data infrastructure to IP-enable their contact centers, businesses can reduce expenses, streamline communications, more efficiently distribute and manage call center resources and provide new enhanced customer services, plus a host of other benefits.

To clarify, let's define the distinct differences between contact center consolidation, centralization and contact center virtualization.

1.Consolidation – reducing the number of locations housing agents from multiple contact center sites to geographically fewer “regional” sites or even to a single “mega-center” site. Combining people, process and technology.

2. Centralization – using servers in a central location(s) to support the contact center functions for agents in multiple locations. Staff does not move in this transformation.

3. Virtualization – a common, centralized ACD configuration supports agents not only in traditional brick and mortar locations, but enterprise locations geographically dispersed throughout the enterprise. Remote agents or home-based agents are also part of this model.

Both centralization and virtualization have similar beneficial effects e.g. centralized administration, reporting and technology infrastructure. Consolidation typically is more complex to execute from a change management and cultural perspective.

In the Hosted/virtualized contact center, customer inquiries can be handled by any skilled service agent in any location to provide greater flexibility and economies of scale meeting service level goals. This increases customer service quality, as customers are receiving the most relevant service by calls automatically routed to the most appropriate agent. Hosted Contact Center is universally beneficial and not market vertical dependant.

The principal business drivers for ROI realization and potential benefits for the Hosted contact center:

Simplified architecture that can easily support IT moves, additions, changes and upgrades. Reduced support costs; technical resources will be required for maintenance on a standardized IP contact center platform. Maintaining less complex environments as a contributor towards operational savings. Reductions in hardware, software and maintenance for one set of everything will ultimately be less costly than maintaining multiple systems at each site.

Consolidation of infrastructures and integrations between complimentary applications such as WFM, quality monitoring, CTI, IVR etc. for distributed enterprise contact centers.

Several geographically distributed sites operating as a single centrally administered contact center. Shorter cycle time and enhanced flexibility in managing and changing contact center environments.

Telco transport charge reduction by sending voice packets over corporate WAN.

Improved agent efficiencies and enhanced customer experiences are some of the softer benefits of IP migration e.g. improved time to response, first call resolution, consistency of experience, shorter Queue times etc.

Agent optimization; economies of scale in handling transactions (calls, email, chat sessions, etc.) link remote or home agents easily and cost-effectively to increase agent pool.

Streamline training and quality assurance (QA), with fewer or even one centralized QA and training staff.

Transformation of the Contact Center

Most contact center managers fully realize just how complicated their infrastructure has become. Many, if not most, contact centers rely on a Complex proprietary systems, legacy equipment, disparate applications with different interfaces and separate infrastructure for voice and data. In addition, a typical contact center comprises thousands of devices, including Automatic Call Distributor (ACD), Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Public Branch Exchange (PBX) platforms, as well as sundry routers, gateways, servers and PCs.

By migrating to Hosted offerings contact center deployment becomes much more cost effective and trouble free. Features and new capabilities can be added and subtracted as needed; agent pools can be shaped and altered in response to changing requirements; equipment, operations and real estate costs become less of a burden and maintenance and management become much less daunting of a task. Businesses gain substantial benefits from utilizing a service provider's infrastructure instead of their own, including:

Lower Capital Costs – With equipment and applications residing within the provider's infrastructure, enterprises can shift from fixedcosts to variable expenses and respond to changing business conditions with greater agility. Network operations, administration & management can reduce costs and more responsive to business commitments. Standardization of Infrastructure shortens cycle time for ramp up and ramp down.

Higher Availability – With built in redundancies and a larger number of circuits available to reroute traffic when unexpected events occur, a service provider's network is much more reliable and accessible than a typical enterprise infrastructure

Improved Quality – With the capacity, equipment and resources necessary to engineer the highest possible voice quality, service providers consistently outperform solutions maintained by enterprises

Enhanced Visibility and Control – With visibility into layer 2 and layer 3 traffic, network-based solutions enable IT managers to shape and monitor the call traffic in real time with much greater precision and control

Improved Security – With the resources and expertise to proactively and predictively monitor the network to stop potential threats before they occur, network-based solutions provide a much higher level of protection for all connected users

Global Reach – The vast global infrastructure of a service provider enables enterprise customers to design an IP contact center solution that fits their exact needs. This flexibility extends branch offices or home agent with broadband access. Geography diversity also addresses the constraints of local labor market and extends the reach of talent pool.

Best Practices to Implement a Hosted contact center:

Develop a detailed migration strategy with defined objectives of timeline and Infrastructure.

Design a very strong & Robust IT LAN Infrastructure and this is one of the key technology components for successful implementation.

Define the ROI and current process and map all steps towards migration and involve all business units.

Define the scalability model and implement the same phase wise for achieving best business results

Deploy the right resources for Planning, Design, Implement, Integrate and Support of the Network architecture.

(The article is authored by Partha Sarkar, CEO, Hinduja Global Solutions)