Cloud improves contact centre competitiveness

Moreover, most of the reasons contact centre managers give for avoiding cloud-hosted services have been addressed as cloud offerings have matured.

Maximise flexibility

In South Africa, hosted cloud uptake has by and large been by start ups and small- and medium-sized enterprises looking to minimise capital outlay and maximise flexibility. Larger businesses, meanwhile, have tended to favour on-premise solutions, citing a desire to maintain control and ensure security. The same has held true with contact centres.

In many instances there is also existing capital investment to consider that sees larger companies wanting to justify and utilise their current infrastructure. In some cases, companies also argue that they've customised on-site solutions to such an extent that hosting is impractical, if not impossible. While this may have been true in the nascent days of cloud computing, the range of solutions available today renders these arguments largely invalid.

Having existing infrastructure doesn't mean a contact centre can't benefit from cloud-based solutions. Hybrid cloud solutions like those powered by the popular Genesys Solution Suite integrate with all major network and storage vendors' products and allow for highly customised solutions. Hybrid cloud offerings can provide flexibility, and thus agility, to even large companies by making short-term or rapid expansion possible without incurring additional capital expense.

Host solutions

While many mobile operators and ISPs have begun offering cloud solutions, few are tailored to the contact centre industry specifically, and many contact centres are reluctant to have to assess generic market offerings to find the best fit for their cloud needs. Elingo's cloud solution makes it possible to offer specific solutions for contact centres while also connecting to existing customer relationship management (CRM) systems, databases and switches.

It's also possible to host solutions for inbound, outbound, recording, workforce management, social media and IVR's. Elingo's entire cloud offering is a pay-per-use model which means that there is no superfluous spend which ensures that contact centre managers needn't worry about upgrades and maintenance costs.

Accommodating cloud issues

Most cloud-based contact centre solutions include monthly billing of customers in arrears, with usage monitoring and reporting configurable to support a customer's existing solutions. This also means billing is conducted on the basis of usage per agent, per minute, and per module and is normalised so that customers are billed for the highest average usage scenario. As a result, things like shift changes - where there may be overlaps between agents logging on and off - can be normalised, as can burst periods where high call volumes may incur short-term increased use.

Bandwidth and stability remain concerns for customers looking to cloud solutions, but these problems are being accommodated, either in the application space that caters for network latency or on the network side which is handled through Elingo's partnership model.