Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

If there is any doubt that obtaining contact center solutions from ACDs to workforce management via hosting rather than buying, installing, and supporting them is the way to go a new survey and analysis by DMG Consulting, “Hosted Contact Center Infrastructure Market Report” should dispel those doubts.

 

According to the paper, the hosted contact center market was one of few industries to show healthy growth in the recession and projections are for it to increase. DMG forecasts the hosted contact center market will continue to grow at a rate of 30 percent in 2009, accelerating to 35 percent in 2010.

 

Hosted contact center solutions are an extremely attractive offering, particularly during recessionary times. Quick deployments, minimal cash outlay, a rapid and quantifiable return on investment, a reduced maintenance burden and the opportunity to “try before you buy” were identified by DMG among the top reasons for growth.

 

“The recession has been very kind to many hosted contact center and CRM application providers,” Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting, said. “End users who can’t afford or do not have cash available for a major capital investment are seeking alternatives and turning to hosted solutions.”

 

The company that is leading the way in hosted solutions is inContact. Among the nine companies analyzed by DMG for number of implementations, inContact had the most in 2008. inContact continues to enhance its offerings and draw new customers to them. The firm appears to be on track to stay in front for 2009 going into 2010. Here is just a sample of recent developments:

 

A strategic partnership with Smoothstone IP Communications which provides cloud-based unified IP communications services.  The alliance allows inContact and Smoothstone to offer joint solutions to customers. 

The two companies recently signed their first joint customer, a 211 information referral organization. This social service non-profit organization processes calls involving community, health and disaster response information for municipalities in California. The organization needed a flexible solution that could deal with the unpredictable nature of their communications needs in a cost effective and reliable way. 

Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. inContact for Microsoft Dynamics CRM improves both the agent and customer experience by automatically providing information to the agent about the caller. For example, if a customer calls into the system from a number in the CRM, all of the information about the customer automatically pops up for the agent

 

New and expanded customer applications with Salesforce.com applications integrated with the inContact platform.  In-Contact signed up U-Store-It for its national sales center. U-Store-It will combine the inContact platform with Salesforce.com’s CRM technology.

Also a claims processing firm that has been an inContact customer for nearly two years will expand the Salesforce.com presence enterprise wide and are expanding into various other offerings from inContact to improve the agent training and customer experience. The company processes calls from thousands of repair facilities and over 200 insurance companies.

New contracts including outsourcer Vector BPO for its operations in Reno, Nevada and The Philippines for up to over 800 seats and three new contracts with direct response marketing companies involving 300 additional agents

 

“We are certainly seeing continued adoption of our Software-as-a-Service, or hosted solutions across a wide segment of the contact center market space,” Paul Jarman, inContact CEO, said. “We have seen steady quarter over quarter growth for the past two years, and anticipate that growth to continue in the coming year, as a result of our superior product offerings, quarterly software enhancements and our never-ending improvements in customer support.”