A Simple Checklist for Call Centers: Separating the wheat from the chaff in the cloud
This post was authored by Prem Uppaluru. Prem is the President & Chief Executive Officer of Transera.
Cloud computing for call centers is a simple but very powerful concept: it delivers the infrastructure and applications required to run your call center as a service. Rather than incurring large upfront equipment and software costs for each of your locations, you subscribe to a service that allows you to scale your operations up and down according to demand. Running a virtual call center in the cloud has many benefits, including lower costs, simplified management of your operations, greater flexibility in how calls are queued and routed, and a centralized view of your call center's performance.
Cloud computing in the context of call centers is slightly more complex than other cloud applications because we are dealing with two clouds: the voice cloud (public and private networks carrying voice traffic) and the application cloud (customer interaction management software). This is important to understand because decoupling the application cloud from the voice cloud gives enterprises the flexibility to choose the voice telephony and transport networks that best meet their business needs. This can generate significant cost savings.
This is an important differentiation. Call center solutions that intrinsically couple the voice and application clouds (rather than decoupling them) fail to deliver the full benefits of cloud computing. Here is a checklist of the qualifying criteria for a genuine contact center in-the-cloud offering. Cloud solutions that adhere to these criteria will inevitably lower operating costs and simplify call center management:
- Can it manage virtual agents? Cloud offerings should be able to source agents internally or outsource them and locate them anywhere: onshore, offshore, or at home.
- Does it support virtual telephony and transport services? Genuine cloud offerings can use IP or TDM telephony from any vendor and IP or TDM transport from any carrier.
- Does it offer multi-tenancy? Multiple enterprises should be able share the same call center application instance while enjoying performance customized to their service level agreement and privacy pertaining to their data.
- Can you access the offering through a browser? A true cloud offering provides web access to agents and supervisors for all elements of the application and doesn’t require you to download client-specific desktop applications.
- Does it operate as Software-as-a-service (SaaS)? Application software in genuine cloud offerings are hosted in a data center on virtual machines and delivered as a service paid for by subscription.
- Does it enable Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) integration? A genuine cloud offering is built using SOA with web application integration protocols and techniques (such as SOAP, XML and HTTP). This enables the application to integrate readily with other applications, such as Workforce Management, Customer Resource Management, and Quality Monitoring.
With the above checklist in hand, you can separate the true call center in-the-cloud solutions from those that are pure fluff—and get ALL the benefits cloud computing can offer call centers.