In contemporary era, almost all business are facing capital crunch and it is no surprise that SaaS and Cloud Computing Services are in demand as they dramatically reduces upfront capital outlay.
However, there is more than meets the eye. Software has been available for lease since past several decades and when offered on lease offers similar financial advantage as SaaS. When taken on lease, there could be little or no upfront capital outlay just like SaaS. In case of an operating lease for software, the monthly payment surfaces as an operating expense in income statement. The leased software stays off the balance sheet and does not show up as an asset. It would seem that the financial benefits of a SaaS model are not much different than getting an operating lease for software. This is true in theory.
In current scenario, company’s do not favour operating leases as compared to software-based technology as the leasing companies want a hard asset. Software may have tangible value, but it is often customized to meet the needs of a specific client, making it difficult to transfer it to a new owner. Software programs are also often governed by licensing agreements that either prohibit the transfer of a license to a new owner. A lot of software products would not be an option for operating leases since the software license can’t be in the lessor’s name.
With SaaS, enterprises can now truly rent software and pay only for what and when they use and still get all the financial advantages of leasing the software. In case of Contact Centers, 3CLogic has come up with innovative models to make SaaS truly attractive from a financial perspective.
1) Customers can rent Contact Center seats on a monthly basis. They pay a monthly subscription fee per seat for the use of Contact Center software. The model is similar to how salesforce.com charges for its SaaS. In case of Contact Center SaaS from 3CLogic, the customer pays an additional fee for call termination, outbound application or toll free service charges for inbound application. It’s customer’s responsibility to manage the number of seats they will be using from one month to next. They can increase or decrease the number of seats in any given month. This model provides tremendous amount of flexibility to the customer – they only pay for the seats that they use and when they use it.
2) It is well known that the attrition rate in Contact Centers is one of the highest in the business world. When a Call Center agent quits or is terminated, it is still necessary to retain all the statistics and analytics associated with his or her ID; at least for a few months. In some marketing companies, the telemarketers are frequently active for a few months and then become inactive for some time, only to return back after a few months. In such situations, the enterprise may find it difficult to keep track of active and inactive seats on a monthly basis; and which IDs to retain for tracking purposes and which IDs to be deactivated. 3CLogic offers a purely usage based model. The Enterprise only pays for the total number of hours the agents are logged into the hosted Call Center Service.
3) The third model that is tied to the usage works is as follows. The total number of call termination minutes are calculated for the entire Call Center in any given month and the enterprise is charged a fee based on the number of minutes consumed. This per minute charge consists of both software charge plus a charge for call termination for outbound application, or toll free service charges in case of an inbound application.
3CLogic offers these kinds of flexible business models because its platform is designed to be a multi-tenant platform from the ground up. The original design took into account that every tenant on its hosted service is going to have different technical and business requirements.
3CLogic’s distributed computing platform has been designed not only to address a variety of technical and business requirements, but the results are delivered to the customer in a matter of days, as opposed to months and years it takes with traditional Call Center platforms.
Raj Sharma 3:40 AM on March 17, 2010 Permalink
How can I use Click 4 Agent API with my Google Ads campaign? I am assuming Google won’t let me insert another HTTP link as part of my Google Ad, or can I? If someone clicks on my Google Ad, can 3CLogic’s Click 4 Agent API pop up a form that can be filled out by the customer for immediate call back?
Amit Sachan 4:35 AM on March 17, 2010 Permalink
We can use Click-4-Agent API with Google Adwords. Widget can be used with any kind of ad campaign (Text, Image or Video). Google Adword asks for
To use 3CLogic Click-4-Agent API with Google Adword, URL specified to Google will be the page url where Click-4-Agent API is deployed.
For example, if I am hosting my business at http://www.your-domain.com and want to promote my product. so I’ll deploy click-4-agent API widget in my domain and will tell Google to send user at this url after someone hit my ad.