A Simpler, More Economical Contact Center—Just Imagine!

It may be hard to envision, but a contact center – even one that uses web chat, email, and self-help to communicate with customers – can be a lot easier to manage and more affordable to operate than you might think.

“Our corporate clients want more economical operations, but they wonder how to make it happen without compromising customer service,” says Advocate Networks co-president Tim Wise. “We advise them to think about moving critical applications and infrastructure to a hosted strategy like Qwest® Contact Center Solutions. It can be a more effective way to manage inbound and outbound activity.” 

Hosted Strategy Reduces Complexity

Adopting a hosted strategy enables companies to avoid the significant capital outlays of a premise-based contact center since they are able to leverage the carrier’s infrastructure. Tapping the carrier’s portfolio of customizable contact center applications also enhances flexibility by providing easy access to the services that most closely match each organization’s business needs.

For example, one company could tailor its hosted service to include IVR with speech recognition and outbound notification by voice, email, SMS message, or fax. Another company with different requirements could use toll-free routing to distribute calls to multiple call centers or even route calls to home-based “virtual” agents.

Those advantages are part of the reason that companies are embracing the hosted concept, says Ali Giacomin, Qwest director of product management for Contact Center Solutions. “We make contact center services simple for clients,” she says. “By leveraging our network-hosted solution, they can create a soup-to-nuts strategy without a lot of capital investment.”

Deploys Quickly to Support Change

Hosted service is particularly appealing to companies that grow through acquisition since they often inherit a hodge-podge of incompatible or antiquated contact center technologies.

“Qwest enables companies to centralize capabilities,” Giacomin says. “They can pull disparate applications together through our cloud and handle the migration themselves or let us do it for them.”

Taking advantage of the resources and experience of a hosted services provider accelerates go-live times considerably. Simple call-flow processes can be deployed in a matter of hours. And efficiency gains, such as eliminating the labor associated with maintaining and managing old infrastructure can generate long-term savings.

Fits High-Availability Environments

Global 1000 companies are recognizing another advantage: many firms are leveraging the Qwest platform to ensure redundancy or disaster recovery. Service level agreements (SLAs) typically offer “five 9s” availability (99.999%), Giacomin notes.

Companies are also using extensive libraries of adapters and plug-ins to integrate hosted services into existing enterprise resource management (ERP) and contact management applications.

Adding capacity to meet seasonal demands is also fueling interest in hosted services. Companies are able operate with less infrastructure and only add resources as circumstances require.

Giacomin advises contact center managers who are interested in hosted services to talk with a local partner. “Partners like Advocate Networks bring a very consultative capability to the relationship,” he says. “They play a very important role in leading the engagement and helping customers understand the benefits working with us.”

To learn more about Qwest Contact Center Solutions, contact Tim Wise (Tim.Wise@advocatenetworks.com) or Scott Fogle (Scott.Fogle@advocatenetworks.com).