Few enterprises today own their own buildings, vehicle fleets, or hardware like copiers. Instead they lease them and for good reasons. These include freeing capital expenditures to be used where these dollars can generate the greatest ROI. It also includes flexibility when business needs change from new opportunities or downsizing; there are no costly assets to purchase/install or unload, which takes scarce time.
The same arguments can be and are applied to contact center solutions known as hosting or cloud computing. Drew Kraus, research vice president, Gartner, adds that leasing/hosting also avoids internal battles over which products to keep in a merger/acquisition. He reports that more firms are selecting hosted solutions, in particular CRM, IVR, and to an extent ACD and routing.
Dave Van Everen, vice president, product management, Five9 reports that more enterprises turning to solutions to support remote/home agents, and blended insource/outsource, and onshore/offshore operations. It is also becoming a popular choice for teleservices firms.
“We’re seeing many outsourcers become Five9 clients, and in doing so go out and win new accounts,” says Van Everen. “They can quickly add seats to their Five9 environment, and often they credit this agility as a competitive advantage.”
Hosting takes up less IT resources and consulting dollars. Alaska Airlines deployed Varolii’s automated outbound voice notification solution to improve service and deflect customers’ calls arising from flight delays and cancellations. It has proven very quite popular; it successfully communicated with more than 100,000 passengers and now supports e-mail and wireless devices.
As a hosted service, Varolii did not place an additional burden on the airline’s IT resources. Its internal staff can create, manage, and edit Varolii applications without coding; it is also saving considerably on consulting services.
“I’ve done a lot of ROI studies of our technologies and this is by far the quickest payback I’ve seen,” says Karen…