I couldn't have said it better myself...

...so, I've copied the text straight from Fred's blog, FredonTech.

In effect, when a business organization is presented with a solution from their technology team which appears to be a proposal to build an entire infrastructure and not a proposal to start solving their business needs immediately, they need to be concerned about the total time to solution and the hidden costs associated with the foundation-building efforts.

Call centers aren't software development shops. They're... call centers!

Instead of building a call center operating system from the ground up, focus on customer service, increasing sales, retaining employees, maximizing revenue per paid hour, first call resolution, average handle time and whatever else truly drives your center.


Type rest of the post here

A Bias Towards Hosted Call Centers

Honestly, I have no particular horse in the race when it comes to hosted vs. premise-based solutions. My recommendation of one over the other would come from evaluating the business need and making a decision based on that. But there seems to be a bias for this model as evidenced by pro-hosting articles and research like this one that only refer to the hosted option, and repeat, ad nauseam, the same old benefits: lowered up-front cost and minimized system maintenance.

Now, those benefits are nothing to sneeze at, but to say the hosted option always costs less to start-up is not necessarily true. Hosting can be a more expensive option!

I think it was in the movie Fight Club that actor Edward Norton said, "On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero." Similarly, given enough time (a year, maybe two) hosted options exceed the cost of premise-based solutions. Well, not always - but it does happen!

So let me reiterate. I'm not against hosting. I'm for it, when the business need determines it. But to not even mention premise solutions in such an article, I think demonstrates a bias towards one method over the other.

Call Centers: Hosted or On-Premise

In an article about hosted or on-premise call centers, Cindy Waxer at InsideCRM posed a handful of considerations for comparing the two methods.

While Cindy does a decent job of laying out the pros for each type of call center solution, there are some additional advantages to a premise-based solution that are not mentioned in her article, and call center managers should seriously consider these when weighing options.

1. Premise-based solutions do, in fact, typically carry a higher up-front investment, and therefore companies who go this route can avoid the capital expenditure. However, the purchase of a premise-based system allows your company to take advantage of depreciation of such an asset, which hosted models do not provide.


2. For small companies, Section 179 of the US tax code allows those small business owners - who acquire equipment for their business - to deduct the cost of such hardware in a single business year rather than over time. Companies that spend less than $450,000 a year on qualified equipment can write off a certain amount in the year in which the equipment purchase is made.

3. Premise-based solution providers can often offer leasing options, allowing the company to stretch payment over time and negating the up-front cost concern.

4. Ongoing maintenance and upgrade costs for hosted solutions can add-up over time, and can ultimately result in costing more - sometimes significantly more - than a premise-based solution.

So, while hosted options are certainly less expensive up-front, time can negate this benefit.

Interactions: You Can't Do Business Without Them

Business is about making money. But revenue cannot be generated, nor can profits be achieved, without interactions—the essential and diverse business interchanges that facilitate every aspect of the buying, selling and delivery of goods and services. So a truer statement would be to say that business is about having interactions which, when done correctly, result in the generation of revenue and profits.

But when we think of interactions, we often take only a surface view of them and oversimplify—even potentially undervalue—their role in the process of business and commerce. In fact, many business leaders do not recognize that there are different types of interactions, some apparent and some ambiguous.


The most obvious interactions are those that involve traditional, direct communication between people—the customer interacting with the sales or service representative, the purchasing agent collaborating with the supplier, or the supervisor mentoring the employee.

And while we may recognize that these interactions are being enabled by technology-oriented communications vehicles, such as a telephone or the internet, we do not typically think of the act of using these vehicles as an interaction itself—it certainly is.

So within person-to-person interactions are more interactions still, the interactions between a person and systems—the help desk agent seeking answers from a knowledgebase or the bank teller querying a terminal application for an account balance or instructions for processing a loan request.

These person-to-system interactions help us recognize yet another type of interaction, the ensuing system-to-system interactions that occur when user interfaces interact with databases and applications, where applications call upon and interact with other applications by exchanging data, or launching specific processes, combining to function in ways that are unique and relevant to a specific business model. Even the presentation surfaces (the very screens that compose the user interface) can and often do represent interactions between multiple entities.

The larger and never-ending dialogue that is made-up of these individual and numerous interactions occurs in every business sector, from multinational conglomerates with sophisticated business operations and an array of business affiliates down to the most rudimentary “mom & pop” organizations.

This global and all-encompassing business “conversation” has long since started between participants of every stripe and has been enhanced and enabled by numerous technology advances—supposedly simplified through standards and guided by development philosophies from numerous software and service providers—that have attempted to provide, in one way or another, at least some aspect of managing and delivering these myriad interactions.

But complexity, rather than simplicity, and clumsiness, instead of agility, has been the result. Today’s typical business ecosystem includes a heterogeneous mix of IT and communications systems, home-grown and packaged software applications, (legacy, proprietary, external and internal), voluminous business processes and documentation, personnel with varying job functions and levels of skill, often distributed into disparate physical locations, and each playing some role within the interactions.

Coordinating all of these assets and the vast quantities of interactions that emanate from them is complicated enough. But to deliver consistent and contextually relevant interactions to the intended audience—for the duration of the business relationship—proves a significant challenge that has introduced the need for an interaction delivery model—a model that can effectively harness the capabilities of human and technology assets, and provide a single, unified solution that gives business leaders a centralized method of delivering the right interaction to the right person (or system) at the right time.