SaaS Considerations
How do you know when to consider outsourcing your customer contact center technology? The
following are the most common reasons companies chose to outsource rather than make the capital
investment in their own technology.
Our current technology was outdated; it no
longer meets our business requirements.
It used to be common to depreciate technology
investments for five to seven years, as this used to be
the expected life of those products. It is now more
common to depreciate your investments over a three
year period. In some cases, premise-based systems
can become obsolete in less than three years. The
pace of technological change continues to increase and
the competition for your customers is fierce.
In order to provide the best possible customer care, it’s crucial to stay current with the technology
that supports your contact centers. A few years ago budgeting a complete replacement of old
technology was something businesses planned for in seven-year intervals. Now the decreased
timeframe is less than five years. If you know your technology simply cannot supply the benefits
required to support your business, you should consider replacing your old technology with a hosted
solution.
We needed to upgrade our system in order to support new features.
How will your systems cope with adding new features? New features help you provide better
support to your customers. New features may be essential to compete with the services provided
by your closest competitors. If the systems in place are less than three years old, they may be
upgradable to support the next generation of features, but at what cost? Integrating new features
into one system can mean months of professional services time and some system downtime for the
upgraded versions of software.
If you are taking a best-of-breed approach you also need to consider how one software upgrade
will impact the operation of your other systems. Most often companies are faced with the reality
that when upgrading one system, they must upgrade the others to ensure proper connectivity.
Upgrades can be more complex than the initial deployments themselves.
We needed a new customer service center up and running quickly.
Whether you are a start-up company or you are launching a new program or service in an existing
large enterprise, you need to get up and running quickly. Finding the time to research vendors, to
learn about system integration intricacies, and to plan how much infrastructure you will need is a
large and difficult task.
Consider the potential financial cost of a wrong decision or the cost of migrating customers. Hosted
solutions enable you to get up and running quickly and provide flexibility to add capacity if
programs are more successful than initial projections. Companies choosing a facility-based model
must decide between overbuying capacity in the expectation of growth or having systems in place
that might not meet customer demand. This can be a difficult and costly dilemma.
We were implementing a virtual agent model in order to gain flexibility and save
money.
Like many customer care executives you may be considering virtualizing your customer care center
to provide greater flexibility in recruiting and hiring high-quality customer care agents. This may
mean opening smaller centers in multiple locations, initiating a complete home-agent model or
some combination of both. Most legacy technology is not designed to support a virtual, distributed
workforce. In most cases, agent management, monitoring, and communication can be limited; the
call distribution intelligence may not be efficient enough to properly service your customers. In all
cases, the telephony circuits going between a customer premise and a home agent are very
inefficient. By putting the solutions in the network, you can limit the cost and complexity of
virtualizing your workforce and provide the flexibility for future changes in this agent model.
We were having difficulty predicting our capacity needs; our business is changing
rapidly.
Businesses can be affected dramatically by changes in economic conditions, by new competitors
entering the market, by the introduction of new and exciting products, or by many other factors.
Change of some kind is inevitable in your business; however, even the very best business forecast
is always subject to unforeseen changes. When buying premise-based solutions, companies often
purchase 20% overcapacity as insurance against under-serving their customers. This overcapacity
is often never used, is not used quickly enough, or is still not enough to handle demand. By
choosing a hosted provider, your required capacity can adjust with your business requirements.
There is no more need to buy 20% growth capacity, just in case. If you need more capacity,
simply add more. If you require less, simply use less.