Contact Center On-Demand for Enterprises

Business used to be slower, and it used to move in steadier, more predictable rhythms. But the days of unvarying activities yielding predictable outcomes are rapidly going the way of the big iron business systems that made them possible.

The business world is adopting an on-demand model. And if the contact center is an important part of your business, it will have to fit the on-demand model of design for change. Whatever challenge you face: reorganization, spin-off, M&A, outsourcing or off-shoring, you need to build flexibility into your call center infrastructure. You need Contact Center On-Demand, or “CCOD” as we’ll describe it in this article.

Two Routes to CCOD

Before we further explain what CCOD is and how it works, let’s acknowledge that there are two fundamental ways to enjoy its benefits:

• Service Provider CCOD. The first way is to source your contact center as a hosted service offered by a service provider, such as a telco. On a pay-as-you-go basis, they’ll make available all the call center technology infrastructure you need, but hosted in the network rather than built on your premises. You won’t need to buy, deploy or manage call center hardware or software. You only need a PC with a headset (or optionally an IP or circuit phone) for each agent. You’ll then be in a position to add and subtract capacity, features, applications, agent locations, and more according to the changing needs of your business.
• Self-Hosted CCOD. The second way is for you to self-host your own CCOD platform. The technology infrastructure is located on your premises like a traditional contact center, but it is set up according to the CCOD model to serve your call center needs on an enterprise-wide basis from one platform. You manage the hardware and software yourself. You benefit from the ability to add and subtract capacity, features, applications, and agent locations in sync with your changing business needs. On-Demand. For some enterprises, self-hosted CCOD is the approach that combines the best of both worlds: the flexibility and financial benefits of Service Provider CCOD, and the control of a traditional premise-based approach. Self-hosted CCOD, or CCOD for Enterprises, is the focus of this article.

Basic Benefits of Self-Hosted CCOD

The essence of self-hosted CCOD is a flexible framework that can help your organization free itself from the rigidity of legacy call center technology, where any change is expensive, and change at the speed of business – i.e. On-Demand – is prohibitively expensive. Self-hosted CCOD transforms the way you acquire and manage your call center infrastructure by providing:

• A Flexible Delivery Model that gives you new ways to distribute and use call center power, functionally, divisionally, and geographically.
• A Flexible Financial Model that redefines the way your company pays for its call center power.

Flexible Delivery Model

Unlike traditional call center technology, self-hosted CCOD is based on a flexible delivery model (FDM) that allows you to assign the right call center infrastructure resources to any part of your organization at any time, and instantly redeploy those resources as your business needs dictate. FDM starts with the call center platform itself being multi-tenant in nature and virtual by design.

Multi-tenancy means that there no longer needs to be a one-to-one relationship between a call center platform and a company, division or business unit. Virtualization means that there no longer needs to be a one-to-one relationship between a call center platform and a physical location. CCOD is the combination of these two factors, which gives you the power to:

1. Deploy a single, centrally managed call center platform that will serve all of your company’s business units. Each business unit may appear as a separate tenant with its own virtual call center on the platform.
2. Use that platform to serve agents wherever they are located, whether that be in one location or many, nationally, internationally or even agents working from home. Each business unit uses its own agents, wherever those agents may be.
3. Use that platform to extend your call center beyond traditional organization boundaries. Rather than have your outsourcers use their own technology platforms, have their agents log in to your central platform and become integral components of each business unit’s virtual call center.

Benefits of the Flexible Delivery Model

By now, I’m sure you’re starting to picture how this approach could dramatically streamline your call center operations. FDM can also:

• Reduce Your Capex
  By centralizing and streamlining your technology, company-wide capital expenditures are reduced
• Reduce Your IT Budget
  It’s easier to manage a single system in one place than multiple systems in far flung locales.
• Consolidate Your Teams
  With a single platform, you only need a single team to manage it. That means you can hire the best, train them only once, and enjoy the efficiencies of a top team that can become deeply knowledgeable about a single skill-set.
• Host Your Outsourcers
  Why lose visibility into what your outsourcers are doing? Put their agents on your central platform. This gives you more control while improving quality.
• Provide Change-Readiness
  Most important of all, now you’re ready for anything they throw at you.
  o Organization re-engineering
  o Merger
  o Spin-off
  o Acquisition
  o New Outsourcer
  o Going Offshore
  o Pulling Back From Offshore
  o New Business Plan
  o Last Minute Campaign

Now you can cope with all of this and more.

Flexible Financial Model

Let’s start with the hardware. Hardware is hardware, and you’ll need it on your premises. Not much flexibility there. But since self-hosted CCOD is based on inexpensive, commodity hardware, this cost is minimized, and the potential for repurposing is maximized. Also, since most of the core servers can be located centrally, additional savings are realized.

But CCOD software brings even more financial flexibility than the hardware. This flexibility takes several forms.

Peaks and Valleys

Here’s an example of a classic challenge: You purchase technology based on your peak usage. You need 300 seats in June, but only 200 seats average the rest of the year. So what do you do? You buy 300 seats for the whole year.

The problem is compounded by the fact that you have multiple sites and business units to contend with. At a second location, you might have a peak of 200 additional seats and an average of only 100. And at a third, 400 more seats peak, 300 average. And even though the peaks are all at different times of the year, you wind up having to invest in a total of 900 seats, even though your average is only 600, and the maximum you ever need at one time is 700.

If all three locations are hosted on one platform, the price can be based on the number of concurrent users across all locations. Looking at the above example, the most seats we’ll ever need concurrently is 700. That’s 200 fewer seats to pay for, right off the bat. Sure, you’re still going to deploy 900 physical seats. But with self-hosted CCOD, that’s not what you’re paying for. You can install as many seats as you need in each location. You pay only the for maximum concurrent agents across all locations.

This example illustrates another potential source of cost savings from the financial flexibility of CCOD. The CCOD platform lets you route calls wherever agents are available. If you can cross-train agents in different call centers, you can cover the load with fewer total employees. This approach would be unimaginable in the legacy environment. With CCOD, it’s a simple reality. Instead of going outside of the enterprise, let your own business units outsource for each other.

Here’s another lesson from this example. Most of the time we only need 600 seats, and only in certain peak months are 700 seats needed. With the flexibility of CCOD, you could go a step farther – invest in only 600 seats, and use outsourcers in the peak months. Let the outsourcers use your self-hosted system, and pay for those extra 100 agents only in the months they’re needed. Then revert back to the baseline of 600 agents.

Paying for Usage Instead of Seats

We’ve all thought about equipping employees beyond the call center with the same kind of information-rich experience we give our call center agents. This would enable our key experts to better handle those calls that are sometimes escalated from the call center. Or, in times of unusually heavy load, it would let us clear out log jams in the call center by temporarily assigning additional staff to pitch in. More important, it would allow many more people to be the destination of the kind of highly intelligent automatic routing that ACDs can do today. But there is one big problem: at a cost per seat of 5 to 10 times more, the expense of equipping all of the potential agents with enough concurrent seats to make them available for occasional calls is prohibitive.

With the Flexible Financial Model of self-hosted CCOD, “the company is the call center” can become reality, because CCOD allows for licensing by peak overall monthly usage rather than by peak concurrent seats. For the price of one concurrent seat license, you can instead purchase a Flex100 license that allows any number of agents to have a total of 100 in-call hours per month. All of the occasional agents can always be logged in and available for occasional calls at the cost of their total in-call usage. With that pricing scheme, everyone in the organization can be configured as a call center agent! Does that open new ideas and possibilities for you?

The Value of Being Prepared for Change

While it’s certainly possible to draw up an ROI case to show how a self-hosted CCOD solution could positively impact your business, the real cost savings come from change preparedness.

How many times has it happened in the past? You made your cost analysis, the savings looked terrific, the solution got implemented, and life was good. Then the reorganization happened, the planning went out the window, and now you’re saddled with a system doesn’t fit the new situation you now face.

That’s business today. Even the list of things that are changing is changing. What you need is a solution that’s designed for change. What you need is an on-demand call center.

You need to be able to change with change. To be able to dial up and dial down your agents, to add sites here, get rid of them there, add and subtract features, functions and applications with the ebb and flow of the powerful currents of commerce.

Benefit Summary

Focus – With the flexibility gained with self-hosted CCOD, you’ll reduce overhead significantly. Your call center infrastructure will simply do what you need it to do. With more options open to you, you will be able to focus more on strategy than on tactics. You’ll eliminate wasted time, effort and headaches, to focus on work that builds business value.

Change-Readiness – With change at the heart of these models, your call center infrastructure will stay aligned with your changing business goals. You’ll be able to scale up, scale down, launch new services or clamp down on spending—quickly and easily enough to handle whatever comes next.

Control – In a changing business environment, managers too often find themselves in the uncomfortable position of knowing what they’d like to do, but recognizing that it just isn’t economically feasible. Control doesn’t just mean meeting your budgetary objectives. It means being able to make the operational changes you want and need to make within the limits of your budget. This is the essence of the on-demand model and of how you will benefit by creating a Contact Center On-Demand in your enterprise.