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.

International Contact Center Week

Raj Wadhwani, president of Contact Center World, and his team have launched International Contact Center Week – a week of celebration and appreciation of the contact center industry at all levels scheduled to occur September 1st thru 8th.

According to the website and an email campaign from Wadwhani & Co., CCW launched International Contact Center Week to promote the hard work and commitment put forth by contact center professionals, to elevate excellence and team work, and to provide a boost to morale.

This all seems fine to me - I appreciate being appreciated as much as anyone.

Not sure what impact this has, if any, on the contact center world but, hey, let's celebrate.

Revolution Resolutions

Happy New Year! (10 days late, admittedly, but a happy one to you nonetheless).

In 2008, the ContactCenteRevolution resolves to post more often, with relevant and timely information that can truly help and inform you contact center professionals out there. We also resolve to update the blog and start using some multimedia capabilities to make it more interesting (we're in the process of creating an Utterz account and possibly moving to a different blog platform).

And your resolutions? Let 2008 be the year that your contact center truly evolves. The technology is out there. So is the expertise. Be smart and seriously consider optimizing that operation of yours. Evolve from a call center to a contact center.

Call Center Vendor Checklist

Here are but a few useful tips to consider when purchasing contact center software:

• Carefully consider the differences between hosted and on-premise solutions. Each has their own merits depending on the business need, but dig deeper than the prevailing hype. Conventional wisdom seems to be that hosted solutions are attractive due to the supposed low-cost, up-front investment. However, when calculating the total cost of ownership, on-premise solutions can be more cost-effective investments than hosted offerings—sometimes even as quickly as within the first or second years of ownership.
• Consider purchasing a call center software solution that allows you the ability to establish integrations between your dialer and other, existing third-party applications or custom, internal applications—without the purchase of additional software and equipment.
• Purchase a software solution that provides you, in a single license, all of the functionality you need to sufficiently operate your contact center. Pay-per application (agent applications, supervisor applications, etc.) can become cost prohibitive.
• Make sure your call center software vendor offers free subsequent software upgrades or otherwise does not force you to upgrade to (and pay for) future releases.
• Seriously consider the fact that many call center software vendors offer “bolted-on” systems with disparate products that were acquired through mergers. Holistic software offerings may represent the better bet since they were designed, from the ground-up, to work together harmoniously and don’t require complex workarounds, proprietary APIs, and additional professional services expertise to implement.