The cloud-based call centers continue to grow

Contact centers are increasingly moving to a fully hosted approach, aka “call center in the cloud”. Gartner predicts that by 2013, at least 75% of customer call centers will use a form of Software-as-a-Service in their call centers.

Given how quickly other parts of the entperise have embraced the SaaS model, you might find this surprising. Gartners’s Michael Maoz (VP research) explains: “You’d think that, with the maturation of the on-demand business model and technologies, that more contact centers would be ready… but

[they] need to be risk-averse because they are so mission-critical…

Will the cloud bring us better customer experience?

Since our main concern at Fonolo is the customer experience delivered by the call center, we spend a lot of time thinking: will a move to the cloud alleviate the flaws? In some ways yes. Because the upgrade cycle on the hosted system should be faster, various flaws that are caused by legacy lock-in should be alleviated.

But the catch here is that the improvements will only be seen if the transition to the cloud is 100%. I suspect most companies will move their call traffic incrementally in which case, this is just another version of the multi-site problem. As I’ve written before, having multiple call centers leads to flaws like inconsistent experiences.

Fonolo can help

Fonolo makes it easier to add a hosted call center to your mix. That’s because Fonolo is really a layer that sits on top of the call center infrastructure, and works independently from it. Fonolo provides a clean, flexible visual interface to your call center operation that becomes part of your website or mobile app.

Once deployed this interface continues to work smoothly regardless of changes to your call center. That means you can make the decision of in-house vs. out-sourced or on-premise vs. hosted based on economic factors, and not worry about the consistency of experience.