Hosted call center technology saves businesses from spending thousands and thousands of dollars for integration, on-going maintenance, software licenses, and waiting the typical 12 to 18 month required implementation time by allowing them to leverage the newest contact center technology for a monthly service fee at a much faster rate.
A large part of the savings businesses experience comes from the scalability of a hosted solution; when excess capacity is needed, it can be turned on, and you are only required to pay for the amount you use. With hardware this is not an option. Hardware requires you have to shell out more money to essentially overprovision your service in order to meet your highest capacity needs, making it not only more expensive, but wasteful as it will more than likely sit idle for the majority of your contract.
Hardware solutions also do not offer large companies and organizations with satellite offices, such as financial and health care institutions, the government regulated requirements when it comes to business transparency and data privacy. Hosted call centers provide secure and remote storage, file backups, and have the ability to handle multisource and multisite installations, and are by nature "virtual", giving them full visibility, and the ability to identify spikes in traffic and bottlenecks. This, in turn, allows you and your employees to provide improved customer care.
Generally, hosted call center solutions involve Interactive Voice Response (IVR), computer telephony integration, and skills-based routing for steering calls to the correct agent. By and large, outbound call center solutions commonly include call scripting capabilities and predictive dialing. In the event of a power outage, hosted solutions provide built-in redundancy, and calls can be rerouted to another facility; likewise, in the event that your employees cannot make it into work due to natural disaster or some other issue, calls can even be rerouted to their personal home and cell phones.
When it comes down to it, with a hosted call center solution you can always be the right size. They offer more flexibility, faster deployment, fewer upgrades, and less ongoing maintenance, making it a "powerful cost of ownership story" according to the Executive Marketing Advisor of a leading hosted call center company. The numbers don't lie; with a growing number of customers that are recognizing the advantages hosted call centers bring compared to investing in premise-based infrastructure, some markets are reporting that the hosted call center industry is growing at year-to-year rate of over 60 percent.
