Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

September 02, 2008

Skills Router from Intuit Now Available as SaaS

By David Sims


Intuit (News - Alert) Consulting announced the availability of its specialist skills routing product, PER, as a software-as-a-service model. Company officials say they believe it is the first in its industry to make this particular business model available to customers.

Tom Pienaar, Director at Intuit Consulting, said he thinks SaaS (News - Alert) is a good fit for the current business climate. "Contact center managers seem to like the all inclusive rental concept because they're not tied in to lengthy contracts or technologies. The set-up costs are low, and the total cost is also much cheaper as it allows for fluctuating CSR (News - Alert) headcount and call volumes," he noted.

Intuit Consulting is also hoping that the flexibility of its PER SaaS offering will prove attractive to the customer service sector: "While enterprise licenses are rich with functionality such as ability- based routing and customer call back, the SaaS model allows the contact center manager to be more selective about the features they use and pay for," company officials say.

"Call centers are extremely time sensitive operations," Pienaar noted. "Even the shortest of hold-ups in customer service or call handling can be costly. The product is our 'Internal SaaS' deployment, where all the advantages of the SaaS model are maintained with a local black-boxed delivery."
 
Early this year Intuit launched a consultant partner program around its QuickBase platform for building on-demand applications, a move the vendor said would assist product providers who are moving away from reselling and implementing packaged applications in favor of delivering SaaS products.
 
According to industry observer Rick Whiting, The QuickBase Business Consultant Program "would help expand market awareness of QuickBase, along with providing such services as sales lead-sharing and training, said Scott Wyatt, CEO of Advanced Integrated Solutions (News - Alert), a Denver-based consulting firm that works with QuickBase and an early participant in the new initiative."
 
QuickBase, a Web-based database application development platform, is used by vendors and businesses to build workflow and collaborative applications such as project management apps and sales team collaboration systems.
 
Mountain View, California-based Intuit acquired QuickBase in November 1999 when it bought Turning Mill Software and now sells the hosted software on a subscription basis.
 
Don’t forget to check out TMCnet’s White Paper Library, which provides a selection of in-depth information on relevant topics affecting the IP Communications industry. The library offers white papers, case studies and other documents which are free to registered users.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David's articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Mae Kowalke


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