Technology for a contact centre

If you have a lot of agents working in one location, the chances are that for telephony-related contact centre applications, on-premise solutions are going to be the perfect fit. They are straightforward to implement and the telephony routing costs associated with a hosted model may prove too high. The pain of routing high volumes would be effectively outweighed by the benefits of using a customer premise equipment (CPE) approach.  For applications that do not involve telephony, cloud-based solutions may still be a very strong option.

For smaller, geographically distributed or home-working organisations where it can be challenging to source good quality telephony applications which cater for the needs of smaller businesses, hosted telephony (recording, ACD, IVR, queuing, agent reporting and management, etc.) is probably an ideal fit. Not only do you get access to technology which shares many of the features used within large enterprises, but you also get flexibility in your payment and usage options.

If we look at hosted call recording as an example, if you have a number of small contact centres located across the country, a unified bucket of call recordings can be created from across all of those centres and centrally accessed. However, a note of caution when considering hosted inbound recording: if it is important to your business to use existing local telephone numbers rather than non-geographic numbers (NGNs) or new geographic numbers (GNs), then CPE will be a better option due to the challenges of routing calls in a cloud-based system.

The other point to note is to first assess your internal resources before making a decision. Do you have staff available and capable of looking after on-premise technology?  It is an asset your business will own and it will be up to you to drive as much benefit and leverage all the key features and functionality. On the flip side of that, you should find that hosted technology vendors will often provide feature-rich applications which are constantly being developed, with very little input from you and with no costly upgrade charges associated.

A managed call centre service approach can usually be applied to both hosted and on-premise solutions, dependent on the needs of your business, and the decision on this again may be down to internal resourcing.