Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Contact Center Solutions Week in Review: Cloud versus Premises TCO

September 13, 2014

The headline for the Contact Center Solutions Community week in review kind of sums up one of the biggest top of mind issues in the community. As more and more organizations evaluate moving contact center functionality in whole or in part to the cloud, if you will pardon the expression the total cost of ownership (TCO) calculations can be cloudy.  It is why the first item is intended to draw your attention to a September 30, 2014 webinar, How Moving Your Contact Center to the Cloud Eliminates Risk, which is all about getting the cloud v. premises TCO calculation correct.  


The importance of the cloud as the future of contact center functionality for many organizations also was illustrated with Fusion and Technology for Business Corp. (TBC) signing an exclusive agreement for Fusion to have the full suite of TBC contact center solutions available on the Fusion cloud. There is also the new study out that says the Customer Experience Management (CEM) market is poised for explosive growth for the next five years, growing on a compounded basis at almost 18 percent a year to over $8 billion.  

The good news this week is despite all of the ominous news in general, the contact center community is flourishing. In fact, as several of the items in the news this week illustrate it is on a hiring boom.  Examples include:

  • Contact center solutions provider Laurus International is hosting a job fair in Puerto Rico in the town of San Juan de la Maguana as it seeks to fill over one thousand positions.
  • Xerox is hiring 200 temporary customer care representatives for its Tempe, AZ, contact center bringing the total number of employees in its two Arizona facilities to 900.
  • Teleperformance U.S.A, a key player in the multichannel customer experience management space, is looking to hire 750 customer care agents at its newly opened Louisville, Ky., facility.
  • eBay is looking to hire 1,000 employees for Wisconsin contact center.

The good news also involved some interesting new capabilities and customer deployments which covered a variety of areas involving improving the customer experience.  For example, Mutare unveiled its Secure Mobile Chat capability that can be embedded into a brand’s apps to enable agents to inexpensively conduct multiple secure chat sessions.   

Plus, the U.S. Mint is overhauling its order management system to become much more user friendly, to Launch New Online Retail System; CallCenterPros announced that its newly launched "Third Party Verification" Services have garnered warm responses from U.S. businesses; Staples integrated in-store and online capabilities to enhance the customer experience and make transactions simpler; and the German VoIP provider STARFACE has announced that it has partnered with jtel to offer a call center solution.

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 In other industry news, there was a new report from Forbes Insights and Sitecore that found executives are unhappy with marketing tech when it comes to customer retention.  And, in comings and goings, Industry veteran Jonathan Judd recently joined NewVoiceMedia, a provider of cloud contact center solutions, as Partner Manager of North America, and Speed Commerce named industry vet Mark Steele VP Global Sales and Marketing.

Last but not least, ContactCenterSolutions Contributor Steve Andersen looked at two reports that attempted to quantify what may be in many ways unquantifiable, i.e, the cost of data breaches which unfortunately in many cases are attributable to contact center issues.    

Weekend Reading

Want to get caught up on industry news and insights? Your best place to do so is by using the links on the community home page. It puts you a click away from constantly up-dated industry news, eBooks, whitepapers, videos, insights and interesting demos. 

Plus, visit our affiliated channels — Accounts Receivable Management, Business Process Automation, CaaS, Cloud-based Contact Centers and Insurance Technology —which contain news and insights on specific areas  of interest. 

Finally, if you were unable to join us for what was an immensely popular webinar, “Business Process Automation Best Practices For Improving Customer Complaint Resolution,” click on the link and view the archived version of the event. 





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