An On Demand Call Center is a hosted call center offering from an ASP that includes services like ACD, IVR
, predictive dialing, CRM, and more. Compared to an on-premises system, a business that subscribes to such a service does not have to worry about in-house technology, infrastructure, and IT staff traditionally required to manage such functions in a call center.
One can’t help but compare the success of On Demand Call Centers with that of other On Demand services offered by Siebel, Salesforce, Microsoft, or Google (News - Alert). Salesforce and Siebel have popularized CRM On Demand, while Microsoft and Google have been hugely successful with On Demand versions of Office and Collaboration software. Comparatively, On Demand Call Center services have had a mixed degree of success and acceptance in the market.
A quick look at traditional On Demand Call Centers
On Demand Call Centers offer robust call center functionality with minimum investment in time, money, and other resources. An entrepreneur or a small business can leave technology and software support to the trained staff of the ASP and focus on growing his or her business. However, these advantages can sometimes be negated when the business owner has to sign expensive and long term contracts, or is asked to reconfigure his network, dump his existing CRM system, etc. Private customization of such systems are virtually unheard of.
Most On Demand solutions offer a wealth of attractive features, like ease of use, flexibility, and data management. No doubt, these are the features that ultimately drive customers to use these services and make a business case out it. However, these features are designed to be sticky for the customer, since switching costs are quite low in the market. Trouble starts when the customer’s business requirements change and there is a need to bring the same On Demand technology in-house supported by the customer’s IT staff.
The Twist
Recently, there have been a number of advances in VoIP
, grids, and Peer-to-Peer technology. For example, VoIP has been widely adopted not only by the call center industry, but a large number of telephone companies and ISPs as well. PC Grids, which can work distributed over the Internet, have been commercialized for enterprise use. P2P has also been in use one form or another. Some of these technologies have also been combined by service providers like Skype (News - Alert), which has shown that normal PCs are capable of a lot more than just phone calls. For example, Skype allows 5-10 person conferences on a laptop PC. How can these technologies — VoIP, grids, and P2P — be combined to help in the Call Center environment?
Software as a Service (SaaS (News - Alert))
SaaS is a model used to provide On Demand Services. Often, SaaS is used interchangeably with Hosted, since there have been relatively few ways to distinguish the two until now. VoIP has been adopted by a lot of hosted telephony and On Demand Call Center providers already, while grid and P2P technologies are hard to visualize as “hosted,” because of their decentralized or distributed nature. One of the main ingredients of any hosted technology is centralization of the service in one place, which, by definition, goes against the nature of grids and P2P.
That’s not the case with the SaaS model. It turns out that these technologies can be combined and deployed in an SaaS model to provide an On Demand Call Center solution with none of the shortfalls of existing solutions.
All Software on Customer Premises
The answer is within the customer’s reach: Grid software runs on Call Center PCs, which communicate with each other using P2P and with the rest of the world using VoIP. P2P provides intra-enterprise communication, which is used to provide PBX
functionality, chat, and more. The PCs become part of a distributed grid that can be used to coordinate large scale (predictive) outbound calling or inbound call distribution queues. The Grid also leverages the PC resources for providing distributed IVR, conferencing for inbound calls, and answering machine detection for outbound calls. The Grid connects to the PSTN
or cellular network using standard VoIP trunks obtained from a hosted VoIP provider.
One of the highlights of this architecture is that the whole of the software sits in customer premises, completely in control of the local IT staff, if necessary. This makes CRM integration or other forms of private customizations a reality.
The management of the grid continues to be hosted outside for the same reasons that On Demand services became popular: specialized IT staff of another company can take better care of it. The path to in-house migration is also a lot easier, since most of the software is already on-site. All the customer needs to make sure of is that the provider allows the management software to reside on-premises. Compared to existing On Demand services, this is a lot easier with grids, since there is less infrastructure to deploy — typically just the management servers.
Conclusion
In the past, On Demand Call Center services have not been widely successful. VoIP grids deployed as SaaS hae the potential to change that by making them much more cost effective, customizable, and flexible. For business managers exploring the On Demand Call Center model, key drivers include:
- Total cost of the service, which typically includes set-up costs, monthly costs, and integration or customization costs.
- Time to set up (is it months, days, hours, or minutes?).
- Security: How secure is the data?
- Flexibility and Migration Path: With business growing or requirements changing, how easy it is to customize or bring the same technology in-house with little change and less training?
To learn more about how Telephony Grids and On Demand Call Center applications, please visit www.3clogic.com. 3CLogic is an innovative Software as a Service (SaaS) provider for call center solutions. Medhavi Bhatia is the CTO of 3CLogic and maintains his blogs at techpiper.blogspot.com and turngeek.blogspot.com.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) | X |
A hardware- or software-based computer system that enables incoming callers to interact with voice prompts or verbal commands....more |
Voice over IP (VoIP) | X |
A real-time communications system that converts voice into digital packets containing media and signaling data that travel over networks using Internet Protocol....more |
Private Branch Exchange (PBX) | X |
Originally, telephone features were provided by telephone central office switching systems, often called CENTREX.�PBX systems emerged as customers wanted to have more calling features and control over...more |
Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) | X |
A PSTN number is a dialed call which is switched or connected via a CO switching system called a Class 5 End office or in SS7....more |