Tagged: Cloud Computing Services RSS

  • Taryn Cheatham

    Taryn Cheatham 10:44 AM on November 30, 2011 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
    Tags: , Cloud Computing Services, Networking   

    Top 5 Reasons Contact Centers are Moving to the Cloud. 

    In today’s age, technology is always further advancing on to new and more exciting outlets and opportunities. Businesses are finding themselves connecting to things such as social media sites and other online networking sites to promote their products and services. Corporations such as call centers are now going virtual, hosting all of their products in the cloud to be available to you. Why would business owners and CEO’s want to host a virtual call center? The answer is simple. Virtual call centers provide more support, more customer interaction and provide more productivity than normal in-office call centers. Lets look at some of the reasons why businesses and contact centers are making their way to the cloud.

    1- Decrease in cost
    Virtual Call Centers based in the cloud diminish your costs and increase your profits. This is because you as a boss, manager, or CEO don’t have to worry about high equipment costs or maintenance. By hosting remote agents in the cloud, you can assure that all agents have what they need with a simple headset and computer. Not to mention that since your remote agents will be working from their own locations you won’t have to worry about loss of productivity during software upgrades or downtime. As an established business owner, you want to make sure that you maintain high productivity rates at all times. Having your agents work remotely benefits both you, them, and your productivity rates all at the same time. You worry less about your agents taking sick and vacation days while your agents work from a location of their choosing, raising the comfort bar for them and boosting your productivity.

    2- Scalability/Flexibility
    With your agents working remotely, they can have calls transferred to any phone line they choose whether it be a home phone, cell phone, etc. Managers can quietly “listen in” to one of their agent’s calls and observe the agent to lead interactions that are taking place. This can be used to fix any problem areas that may be going on or bridge any communication gaps. Calls can be transferred and assigned easily to agents. Agents can also be assigned to multiple campaigns at the same time. With 3CLogic’s virtual call center platform, tools such as scripting are available to managers and agents to enhance performance and efficiency. Use the softwares tools to scale your business size to your current business demands. Easily scale your contact center larger or smaller with these flexible tools to fit your needs. 3CLogic’s virtual call center software’s state-of-the art dashboard gives real time insight into your contact center operations while historical reports supply data for in-depth analysis.

    3- Call Tools
    With 3Clogic’s Virtual Call Center software you can more efficiently reach and interact with your customers by using tools such as VoIP Call Blast, predictive dialing, and inbound and outbound calling features. Use the VoIP Call Blast tool to send out a pre-recorded message of your choice to thousands of contacts at one time. With this tool, you can easily access the online reports and analysis of your online campaign. The process is easy and fast for you to do. It’s as simple as, recording your message, uploading your numbers, and sending them out at your times of choosing. In the business world, time is money. With 3Clogic’s predictive dialing features, you can ensure your time will be used wisely. The predictive dialing tool eliminates manual dialing and skips over all bad numbers and voice mails. Only direct calls with real customers on the other end will be connected to your agents saving time, and boosting sales.

    4- ROI- Return of Investments
    You can easily adjust your pricing to cater to each business’ budget. 3CLogic’s software also offers flexible pricing options. Pay for what you need as you go, without any huge upfront capital investments. Eliminate the worry of large down payments, or a down payment at all. With this 3CLogic software, you pay as you go on a monthly basis.Pay for only the services you need and use, no extra charges or hidden fees. Administer the software’s scalability tools to increase or decrease in volume as and when required by business.

    5- Fast set up times
    With most in-office call centers, it can take months to set up a call center. You have to hire the agents, make the schedules, buy the software, and set up the cubicles. You also have to make sure everything is up and running before you start making any profit. With 3CLogic’s Virtual Call Center in the Cloud, you can deploy your call center and start doing business within a few hours. This will take your productivity rates to new levels and make you a threat to your competitors by being efficient and in tune with your customer’s needs.

     
  • Raj Sharma

    Raj Sharma 1:59 PM on January 30, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
    Tags: , Cloud Computing Services, , , SaaS business models call centers contact centers enterprise operating lease software as a service distributed computing usage based,   

    Software As A Service (SaaS) Business Models For Contact Centers 

    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

    Raj Sharma 5:28 AM on January 29, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
    Tags: , Cloud Computing Services, , , SaaS security call center CRM financial services credit card numbers social security numbers,   

    Security And Data Lock-In Concerns with Software as a Service (SaaS) 

    Whenever I read an article about SaaS or participate in a discussion that has anything to do with SaaS, concerns about security and data lock-in always surface at some point. When call center software is being delivered as SaaS and if the client application is in the financial industry, security requirements may even become show stoppers for the call center service to be delivered as a cloud service. The financial client may mandate that confidential customer information such as credit card numbers and social security numbers cannot be transmitted or stored outside of the customer premise. Traditionally such stringent security requirements dictated that the call center solution be deployed on customer’s premise. Only if there was a solution that would let the financial customer have the cake and eat it too i.e. opt for the call center solution as SaaS while ensuring that sensitive customer information never leaves its premise.

    Marrying distributed computing architecture for a call center solution with SaaS, it is possible for customers to have their cake and eat it too. With a distributed computing architecture for call centers, sensitive and confidential information is stored on-premise close to where the call processing is happening on agent’s desktop. And non-sensitive information about that customer record such as name and phone number is stored in the cloud and used as a pointer to fetch sensitive information from a local database or a CRM application when the call is connected. All the management, reporting and analytics for the call center is still delivered from the cloud. Sensitive and confidential information such as call recordings are stored locally on customer premise instead of storing these in the cloud. This is possible because with a distributed architecture there is no centralized dialer operating in the cloud. Recordings are done on agent’s PC where the call processing is also done and the recordings are streamed to a local server for retrieval later on. If all this sounds like “just-in-time” security for call center SaaS, it is. And it is made possible by combining distributed computing with cloud computing services.

     
  • Raj Sharma

    Raj Sharma 11:40 AM on January 28, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
    Tags: , Cloud Computing Services, , , ,   

    What’s The Difference?: Cloud Computing Services, Hosted Services, Software as a Service (SaaS) 

    Ever wonder what’s the difference between all these service types? They all deliver a service over the Internet cloud. Whether it is a backup or word processor application or a call center application, the customer is still using software and hardware resources of servers maintained by someone else. Traditionally, the customer was responsible for sizing the hardware and software resources, procuring the servers, installing and configuring the servers and maintaining these resources in a data center.

    With hosted services, all these tasks are delegated to the provider of Saas or Cloud Computing Service. Since the SaaS provider has hundreds of customers, she may decide to house these customers on the same set of servers, using partitioning or virtualization. Server resources are efficiently utilized lowering the total cost of the service that is being delivered.

    The customer only pays for what she uses and has the added flexibility of ramping up or down the number of subscribers using the service. It is easy to implement and get started, thus lowering the burden and dependency on the in-house IT staff. There are concerns about security and trust when you turn over your mission critical application to a service provider. There is additional worry about being locked into a service because it may be hard to move or migrate the application data from one provider to another or if the data needs to be brought in-house.

     
    • Tanvir Alam

      Tanvir Alam 7:24 AM on January 29, 2010 Permalink

      Cloud computing is good for the companies who can’t afford hardware/software resources at large scale or they want to use it for very limited period of time. It gives them more flexibility to explore new option and take more risk with less investment.

      The real concern of cloud computing is downtime and security. In last year Sep, gmail was down for couple of hours and it’s created mayhem!

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