Call centers can cut costs by using cloud-based solutions

MANILA, Philippines - Call centers can lower the cost of their contact handling and workforce optimization infrastructure by up to 43 percent over a five-year period by using cloud-based offerings rather than installing equipment in their own facilities.

This was disclosed in a recent study by Frost & Sullivan entitled “Premise vs. Hosted Contact Center: Total Cost of Ownership Analysis.”

The study, commissioned by inContact, analyzed 12 call center designs with sizes ranging from 50 to 500 seats and in functionality from different telephony systems such as ACD, IVR, chat, outbound dialer, quality monitoring, workforce management, customer feedback, agent hiring and eLearning system.

The analysis of total cost of ownership (TCO) concluded that hosted call center services significantly reduce TCO over premise-based systems in both three- and five-year scenarios for all 12 designs analyzed.

inContact country manager Junie Pama said call centers could save on costs of systems and applications, implementation, maintenance and upgrades, and hosted per-agent, per-month fees.This is because compared with cloud-based solutions, traditional premise-based infrastructure requires an upfront capital investment that can easily exceed $1 million, maintenance contracts that are typically 15 to 25 percent of the purchase price, ongoing expenses, and equipment replacement every five to seven years.

The study also found that the larger the call center is, the higher the savings are with the hosted model. Over five years, 100-seat centers averaged 23 percent savings, 250-seat centers averaged 34 percent savings, while 500-seat centers averaged 43 percent savings.

inContact, which built its Asia-Pacific headquarters at the Bonifacio Global City in Taguig, provides the world’s largest cloud-based call center solution, with over 800 call center deployments and is used by more than 60,000 agents globally. It creates profitable customer experiences through its powerful portfolio of cloud-based call center call routing, self service and agent optimization solutions.

The company’s services and solutions enable call centers to operate more efficiently, optimize the cost and quality of every customer interaction, create new pathways to profit and ensure ongoing customer-centric business improvement and growth.

Meanwhile, an American expert in call center management and international outsourcing will discuss the latest technology in call center operations that can help companies reduce costs by 40 percent, during the Annual Call Center Conference & Expo 2011 to be organized by the Contact Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP) at the SMX Convention Center in Pasay City on Aug. 3.

This year’s annual call center conference, supported by inContact, the world’s largest cloud-based call center solution provider, will tackle the major issues and technology trends in the call center industry. The summit is spearheaded by CCAP, the official organization of outsource and in-house call center service providers in the Philippines.

Brian Liebenthal, the director of call center operations for Bosley Medical Beverly Hills  in California, the world’s largest cosmetic medical practice provider, was selected by CCAP to share with the Philippine call center industry his more than 16 years of experience in business operations, call center management, as well as training and employee development. Liebenthal had to navigate the sometimes murky waters of premise vs hosted, centralized vs decentralized, captive vs onshore vs offshore and also looked at and implemented remote (at-home) agents. He has been at the forefront of the many issues that confront call center executives and managers today, and will share his firsthand knowledge and experience in dealing with these most pertinent issues.

At Bosley Medical, Liebenthal is in charge of the 24/7 International Direct Response call center operations and training. The call center handles 60,000 inbound calls and 1,000,000 outbound calls per month.  Liebenthal implemented and managed a cloud-based call center platform, enabling Bosley to decentralize its call center in the United States and expand internationally while maintaining full control of the entire operation from Beverly Hills.