Cloud-based Virtual Call Centers Deliver Ultimate Agility and Cost Savings

From salesforce.com to Google Apps cloud computing is all the rage these days. Businesses of all size and type are turning to cloud-based applications to improve agility and eliminate IT equipment costs and administrative hassles. With cloud computing, IT applications are hosted in a secure and reliable third-party data center and delivered in the form of a convenient Internet-based on-demand service, so any business can enjoy enterprise-caliber features, scalability and reliability without upfront equipment purchases or ongoing operations burdens. Not surprisingly, cloud-based services are popping up for just about every application.

One particularly attractive cloud-based service is the Virtual Call Center. A Virtual Call Center leverages Internet scale and economics to deliver “big company” call center capabilities without all the cost and complexity of a traditional premises-based system or hosted call center offering.

Traditional premises-based call center solutions rely on expensive office telephone gear. Even if you already have a premise-based system in place you still have to deal with ongoing management and support expenses.[1] Valuable IT resources are squandered on rudimentary tasks rather than issues germane to your business. Adding capacity or new features can be expensive and time-consuming. And most incumbent solutions don’t support today’s Internet technologies and services - and they certainly won’t support tomorrow's applications.

In the past, some businesses have turned to hosted call center solutions to reduce equipment costs and administrative hassles. But conventional hosted call center services are far from ideal. Most hosting providers simply house traditional telephone switching equipment in their data center and manage it on the customer’s behalf. With a traditional hosted service each and every call passes through the service provider’s switching infrastructure. Providers are forced to add costly switching equipment to increase capacity or for high availability. They pass their costs along to the customer in the form of higher rates. Worse still, adding users or capacity can require equipment or network upgrades which can take days or even weeks, making it difficult for companies to respond to rapidly changing business conditions or last minute campaigns.

A Virtual Call Center removes the limitations of a conventional hosted solution by employing a “signaling-only” architecture to minimize costs and maximize agility. A true cloud-based service, a Virtual Call Center “signals” calls over any network– SIP/VoIP, Skype, Google, PSTN – for ultimate flexibility and economics. Since the Virtual Call Center is not involved in the media path it doesn’t require expensive switching equipment, and capacity and users can be turned up in real-time.

Virtual Call Center advantages include:

• Low TCO and ROI – no CAPEX, low monthly fees, minimal OPEX
• True on-demand provisioning – add users, capacity and features on-the-fly
• “Big company” capabilities – enterprise-strength security, reliability and scalability
• Maximum flexibility – works with or without a PBX; supports any device or network
• Multiple modes of collaboration – voice, text chat, video, screen sharing
• Peer with other cloud-based services – integrate with Salesforce, Google Apps, Azure, etc.
• Future-proof – easily adopt new applications and services

With all these benefits, it is no wonder forward-looking businesses are turning to cloud-based Virtual Call Centers.