Is your hosted technology provider a trusted advisor or box dropper?

The case for cloud is now closed

The business case for cloud-based call centres is irrefutable – it is almost always better to leave the procurement, configuration, operation, maintenance and updating of a complex technology platform up to the hosting provider.

The host, after all, has the economies of scale to offer a fixed, reasonable monthly charge, the vendor relationships to procure the most cutting-edge technology, and the specialist skills to keep it in mint running condition.

Then there are the cloud-specific advantages, such as the ability to provide just enough capacity for your business peaks and troughs, with flexible charges to match this “elastic” delivery.

But not all providers are equal

In practice, of course, not all hosted providers are equal, and the problems of using complex technology don’t go away by simply going the hosted route. In fact, customers will experience a world of difference in choosing between the following two types of providers:

• ‘Box droppers’, that drop the minimal on-site equipment needed to operate the remote system (phones, PCs and Internet gateway), along with minimal instruction, and then retreat behind a shared-call service number; and
• Consultative providers that take the trouble to help ready the customer’s technology for cloud delivery (including line redundancy and quality of service), manage change (including training), and weave the system into business processes and goals.

Major success factor

Choosing right can mean the difference between success and failure of your cloud implementation.

It is as important as choosing the right solution and service delivery model, since it influences everything – basic set-up of the technology, operation, trouble-shooting, quality assurance and technology refreshes.

By choosing a partner with a service-centric, consultative approach, customers can be sure that core issues such as their call routing and queues are set up with the help of the experts, reports deliver the best possible analysis for their business type and goals, and their system functions with optimal quality and productivity.

A proven, hosted call centre technology provider that wraps its technology in a solid service offering offers many other benefits, including:

• A single point of contact – the best call centre technology host providers can cite many cases in which they’ve arranged an end-to-end solution, from data lines to the solution itself, its assembly and integration into company systems, and project management.
• Optimal routing – providers with past experience can offer call routing configuration that ideally suits companies with your characteristics.
• Optimal reporting – experience can again mean the difference between struggling to match hundreds of report templates against your needs and finding the correct few right away.

Good head-start

Having the right hosting partner will make a visible difference from the get-go. Setting up a call centre is a rare skill, and any company attempting to do so without solid support from their tech provider will, at best, spend months to iron out the issues.

Multiple competitive issues might arise from this, such as loss of market agility and high cost.

With the right support your learning curve can be shortened to weeks. Look for providers with the credentials that cite a full house of proven skills and the willingness to be operationally involved.

Source: http://companies.mybroadband.co.za/blog/2012/01/16/in-the-cloud-but-not-in-the-dark/

“We speak to a lot of people who think that opinions about their companies expressed via social media can be ignored because it’s just for kids and guys on skateboards,” says Hewson. “The truth is that social media is now so pervasive and so mainstream that you can’t afford to ignore it if you want to know what people really think about your business.”

Focus groups and surveys are not only expensive, Hewson points out, they are not always reliable. “People often feel the need to be nice if they’re responding to a survey or focus group. When they’re talking to their friends they’re under no such constraint – that’s when you get the real truth about what they think. It’s incredibly valuable information that more companies should be using.”

To listen and respond effectively to their customers, companies should integrate social media into the daily workflow of their contact centres, says Hewson. “A social media connector for your contact centre management software should give you the ability to monitor conversations across a variety of platforms, alert the appropriate people and enable them to respond quickly and easily from within their main application,” he says. “A comment on Twitter or Facebook should appear in the same stream as incoming emails, and be dealt with even more quickly.”

1Stream offers a social media connector for users of its Customer Interaction Center platform which supplies near real-time alerts based on keywords – with a sentiment score attached to each alert so extreme negative opinions by influential people, for example, can automatically be prioritised. Alerts can automatically be routed to the right person or department depending on their content, and agents can respond directly from within Buzzient so that all interactions are tracked. The connector includes full activity tracking and reporting so that managers can easily track and stay on top of social media activity.

Social media tracking not only provides a useful proxy for customer satisfaction, it can also feed into Net Promoter Scores, adds Hewson. “A quick, appropriate response to a complaint expressed via social media can turn an unhappy customer into an advocate for your brand,” he says. “It gives the kind of promotion you could never buy.”

Responding to customers in the forum of their choice also marks companies as engaged, modern and caring, says Hewson. “The mantra of social media is ‘speak to your customers where they are’. If your customer mediates their life through Facebook or Twitter, that’s where you should be addressing them.”

“The days of making large capital investments in equipment that needs a lot of skill, effort and money to maintain are over,” says Von Maltitz. “The hosting model means you simply buy the services you need, when you need them. Applying that model to buildings as well as technology means you can walk into a new office and start operating within a few days – without taking huge financial risks.”

1Stream has partnered with Globility, a division of leading business continuity provider ContinuitySA, to launch a “walk in and talk” contact centre solution. The offering combines fully managed premises providing everything from reception services to furniture and PCs, with a world-class telephony platform based on Interactive Intelligence technology.

“Many of our clients are wondering why they ever managed their premises themselves,” says Globility MD Anthony Askew. “We take away all the pain of landlord and IT issues, whether it’s trying to sort out leaking toilets, slow lifts, bandwidth issues or a broken headset. Trying to manage that yourself can waste hours of productive time. Now our clients just log a call with our 24 hr service desk and we sort it out.”

Globility and 1Stream currently operate in Johannesburg and Cape Town and are investigating a move into Durban as well, says Von Maltitz. “It’s an ideal option for first-time investors into South Africa who are looking for a low-risk way to enter the country,” he says. “We can offer world-class premises and technology without any of the set-up hassle – which leaves contact centre managers free to concentrate on getting the most out of their employees.”

Staffing accounts for around 70% of the typical contact centre’s costs, notes Von Maltitz. “That should translate in to 70% of management time and effort, but too often people get sidetracked by technology issues. If the technology is taken care of, people can maintain a tighter focus on their actual operations.”

The service is not just for foreign investors, adds Askew. “Everyone has to manage their costs more carefully and increase their productivity,” he says. “Some of our clients have come to us because running their contact centres from their own main head office buildings had become stupidly expensive and they needed a hassle-free alternative.”

Others, he says, need to be able to ramp their operations up and down quickly to cope with peak traffic. “You may need 100 extra seats over the holiday period, but renting and fitting out a new set of offices and buying new software licences would make the whole exercise too expensive,” he says. “By using hosted premises and a hosted technology platform you get the extra capacity your business needs in the short term, without creating a financial burden for the future.”

Hosted contact centre solution provider 1Stream has accounced it now offers integration with leading CRM provider Salesforce.com.
“It’s predicted that Salesforce will become the most-used CRM product in the world this year, ahead of rivals like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft,” says 1Stream director Jed Hewson. “It already has 14.2% of total CRM market share and trends company Trefis predicts this will rise to 25% in the next five years.”

The reasons so many people are turning to Salesforce.com are simple, says Hewson: “Cloud-based CRM is quick and easy to implement and the total cost of ownership is low compared to buying a solution outright. There’s also flexibilty: If it turns out not to be what you need, you can switch it off at the end of month and change to something else. You can’t do that so easily if you’ve made a huge upfront capital investment in a system.”

Salesforce.com is also easy to integrate with other applications, he says. “They’ve already solved the problem of how to integrate with just about anything,” he says. “You simply go to their app centre, download a pre-packaged integration system and away you go. For us to integrate Salesforce.com with our own hosted platform from Interactive Intelligence was the work of a few hours. Our customers can now turn it on anytime they want.”

“Salesforce is a phenomenal tool and a perfect fit for contact centres,” adds Hewson. “There’s a call scripting tool, for example, that’s easily configurable by anybody with basic training.

1Stream’s hosted contact centre solution is offered on a pay-as-you-go basis, with customers able to change the number of seats from month to month. “Everything you need to run a world-class contact centre is available out of the box,” says Hewson. “There’s no reason for contact centre operators to spend their time working on technology: Their advantage lies in their people, and managing people is what they can most profitably focus on. Hosted technology solutions enable them to do that.”

“Most call centres experience peak traffic for a couple of hours a day,” explains Von Maltitz. “If you staff to meet the peaks, you end up with idle capacity for the rest of the time. You’re not only paying a salary, you’re also paying for an extra desk, chair, computer, network capacity and all the rest. The overheads are high.”

What is more, notes Von Maltitz, “every employee who works full-time on site is entitled to an hour-long lunch break and two tea breaks. For every eight-hour shift, you’re doing really well if people spend four and a half to five hours actually on the phone.”

Using home-based workers to meet peak demand is the most cost-effective way to solve the problem, he says. “There are thousands of mothers in particular who would welcome the opportunity to earn extra income during the hours while their children are at school, and who would make superb call centre workers. Enabling them to work from home means you cut out the expense and time of commuting, for both parties – many contact centres pay for employee transport, especially after hours.”

Yet many South Africans don’t seem to trust that home workers will actually work, says Von Maltitz. “You need a mature workforce and a mature management style to make it viable – but there is a great deal of technology to make the job easier.”

Connectivity is getting better all the time, says Von Maltitz, and hosted call centre suites mean home-based workers have access to exactly the same systems as if they were sitting in an office. “And managers have access to exactly the same information as well,” he adds. “Whether an agent is sitting at the desk next door or at the other end of town, you can monitor their performance in just the same way – right down to listening in on calls.”

In future, says Von Maltitz, South African call centre operators should include home agents in their planning. “A lot of thought goes into where to place call centres – and even if you find suitable premises close to public transport nodes, South African public transport tends to be unpleasant and unreliable. Setting up a number of home offices may be a better option.”

“The technology platform already exists,” says Von Maltitz. “If someone makes the decision to enable home working today, the systems could be up and running in a few days. All it takes is the management and willingness to try something new.”

“When recession looms everyone looks for ways to cut costs – and the IT press is full of vendors arguing why their product is so essential it shouldn’t be among those cut,” says Hewson. “But the brutal reality is that cuts have to come from somewhere. We typically see CIOs and IT managers having to slash their project lists by half or three-quarters.”

The technology of hosted services has come along at just the right time, argues Hewson. “We’re at one of those rare moments when you can cut your costs in absolute terms and improve your systems at the same time.”

Hosted contact centre solutions are typically priced per seat per month, he says, offering flexible capacity as well as predictable costs. “When you’re trying to assemble or maintain the technical base of a contact centre on your own, there are unexpected costs around every corner,” he says. “One piece of equipment won’t work with another so there are extra development costs, or you need to buy extra licences or upgrade between versions of key software.”

“A hosted solution delivers everything as a single package at a fixed price, so there are no surprises,” says Hewson. “That means lower financial risk – and the costs of maintenance are the service provider’s problem.”

Keeping contact centre platforms up to date is especially critical, he says, as the contact centre increasingly becomes the main customer touch point. “There are many organisations nowadays that are impossible for customers to speak to except through their contact centres,” he says. “If it’s your key customer interface, you need to manage people, time, performance and quality especially carefully. Hosting allows you to do all that while also paying less for your capacity.”

“When times are good people are relatively willing to forgive service mistakes,” says von Maltitz. “But when money is tight, customers get a lot more critical – every rand they spend is important to them, and they expect decent service for their money. The contact centre is increasingly where that service is being delivered.”

The contact centre should take priority over adspend or sponsorships, argues Von Maltitz. “There’s no point in advertising your special on TV if all people get when they call in is a long wait, a set of shoddy interactive voice response (IVR) messages and eventually an agent who doesn’t actually know what’s going on.”

Von Maltitz, a director of hosted contact centre technology company 1Stream, says opting for a hosted solution can free contact centre managers up to concentrate on managing people and service.  “Your contact centre is either a sales channel or a service channel or both, and it’s critical that employees are well trained and well managed,” he says. “That should be the manager’s job – not worrying about whether the technology is working or not.”

Under a hosted model, contact centres buy services, rather than software or hardware from a provider – usually at a fixed monthly price per seat. “This usually results in absolute cost savings on technology, as well as making costs much more flexible,” says von Maltitz. “Scaling up and down to accommodate changing demand is as simple as ordering or cancelling another seat for the month.”

It also means, notes von Maltitz, that keeping abreast of technology changes is no longer the contact centre manager’s problem. “Investing in the best systems available sometimes doesn’t make financial sense if you’re not handling huge volumes of calls to offset the initial capital cost. And they’re obsolete in a few months anyway, plus you have the problem of integrating different pieces of equipment and keep up with patches and updates.”

With a hosted service, on the other hand, “you buy an integrated suite of services that’s always up to date,” he says. “And even smaller contact centres can afford the very best technology on the market.”