3CLogic Blog » Hosted

Hosted Contact Center… Say Wha?: Cloud call centers for beginners

Taryn Cheatham — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 16:47:15 +0000

When I first started here at 3CLogic, I couldn’t tell you the difference between a traditional brick and mortar call center from a hosted contact center. “Hosted? What’s a hosted”? I soon came to learn all of the new and exciting call center capabilities that are available to companies looking to start or revamp their existing call centers. With all these technological advancements in place today, a hosted contact center seems to be the ideal solution to pricey traditional call center infrastructure costs.

It’s clear how I feel about outsourced agents; (Don’t remember? Take a look at last week’s post to get a friendly summary) it’s almost easier to try and troubleshoot on your own then calling an outsourced support line to only receive a lack of support, and a blow to your wallet. That’s the beauty with hosted contact centers. As a contact center business, you have complete flexibility and scalability to fit your individual business demands. Want your call center on premise? Want to have your agents hosted from various locations to eliminate hefty infrastructure fees? Want a hybrid solution of both on premise and remote locations? I’d hate to steal the slogan but… this ain’t Burger King, but you can most certainly have it your way.

Deploying a hosted contact center is ideal for a company looking to deploy and launch their contact center operations within a matter of hours. Pricing is scalable too, which means you have the benefit of paying for what you use and what you use only, on a per month basis. Various solution providers such as 3CLogic, provide companies with call center software to effectively and efficiently run their call centers with ease. Home agents can be trained and tested with online 3CLogic certification courses which allow administrators to evaluate agent skill and performance. This is done to efficiently match the most qualified agents with valued customers. By taking that extra step with agent management, managers ensure that their customers end their transactions with a solved issue, and a smile on their face. Ahh, how refreshing is that? How many times can you honestly say that you’ve had a pleasant experience with a customer support issue with outsourced agents? You have a story, we want to hear it!

Want an overview on Hosted Contact Center features and functionalities? Find more information–> http://www.3clogic.com/existing.html#proja

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

Raj Sharma — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 21:59:04 +0000

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.

Has the time come for pre-paid Contact Centers?

Nitin Gupta — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 13:37:57 +0000

More than 40% of the mobile phone users in OECD markets are pre-paid customers. Does this mean that there is equally big size of marginal customers in call center business who would like to use the services of “Virtual Call Centers“? If I go by my intuition, this should be true.

One of the major users of such service would be companies engaged in direct marketing. Ever since American Express began marketing its credit card directly through post, the sales and marketing has evolved further in personal selling by companies like Tupperware, Amway and Oriflame. Such techniques usually have no advertising budget for media, but for parties and rewards. The sales agent in this model is not usually the direct employee of the company. These companies form hierarchy of sales agents from freelancers (usually housewives). The goal for each sales agent is to sell the maximum and add equally good number of sales agents. Such agents do need a call center and definitely they are not ideal to handle the daily functioning of such call centers. These agents have no budgets other than the estimate of how much they earned last month. Such agents are “the” marginal agents who will love the idea of pre-paid contact center. The reason is simple and quite analogous to the reasons mobile companies have pre-paid cards or banks issue debit cards:

They allow user to monitor their usage
They can be used by students, immigrants
They can be used by people who have poor credit ratings

Personal selling agents are just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more home based agents whom I consider “marginal”. They are engaged in selling insurance and sometimes just campaigning for a cause, political and apolitical. These agents get to earn against the number of calls they make or the number of successful sales they make. These agents have very small budgets and very small campaigns that do not even run into weeks. Such agents will definitely like to benefit from a pre-paid account.

And just to add, 3CLogic is one of the few companies who setup pre-paid accounts for this micro-economy community of Virtual Call Centers.

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

Raj Sharma — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:40:19 +0000

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.

How is Server based Central dialer different from Distributed 3CLogic dialer?

Nitin Gupta — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:25:32 +0000

To put it simply, a dialer is a piece of code that dials a number automatically.
The goal of the dialer can differ with requirements. As an example, consider that Jane wants to call all her friends to invite them for dinner. She will do this in her own leisure and will call all the numbers sequentially, repeating them until she has called them all. This is what 3CLogic calls a Power Dialer.
Now consider that she has 10000 guests to call. She will definitely need to hire some help, let’s call him George, to call on her behalf and let him make the calls. Since she is paying George per hour, she will like to make sure that her hire reaches the maximum number of guests possible in an hour(That’s being Scrooge). If I assume that some of these 10000 guests must have their phones sending calls directly to automated answering machines, Jane will be paying George to identify her guests on answering machines. What if most of her guests do not pick up, sending George directly to their answering machines? This would really hit Jane where it hurts; her wallet. All of these calls being sent to answering machines will cause Jane to be doubly poor because she is paying George for all the time he spends. One of the obvious goals for the dialer is to identify if the number is on an answering machine using standard heuristics called Answering Machine Detection. When the dialer detects answering machines before handing off the call to George, he can skip that call and move on to the next guest. 3CLogic calls this type of dialer, the Rapid Dialer.
Now let’s add in the fact that Jane only has one day to complete the calls. By golly, she will have to hire Sally to work with George. Now Jane has hired two representatives and still is pressed on time issues. This makes the dialer a bit more interesting, because now the dialer applies artificial intelligence to determine when her hire is going to put the receiver down so it can start dialing a little earlier than that.
During your own personal phone calls you may have noticed:
• There is some time consumed in dialing
• There is some initial silence, while your call is being connected
• There is some ringing before the caller picks up the call
If the dialer saves time for Sally and George, they are likely to make more calls per hour and will be more likely to complete the calls in a day. This is what we at 3CLogic call, the Predictive Dialer.
Now poses the real question: How is a server based central dialer different from a distributed 3CLogic dialer? To start with, it saves Jane the cost of the central server which amounts up to thousands of dollars. The 3CLogic dialer also uses free computation cycles that Sally and George have on their laptops. This saves her greenbacks on power requirements. The 3CLogic dialer uses heuristics and algorithms which outdo even the best central dialers available in the market today. This all helps Jane save a few hours, and a few bucks- on commissions.
To give you an overview of why the 3CLogic dialer works better than a central dialer, let me expand the number of hires to a bigger value, say 64 agents are hired and the calls to be made are racking up to a few million. Now imagine how many quad core central servers will need to compete to make this raw power available. Did you say 16? Well, you have just made a point why distributing the calls on the 3CLogic dialer makes the most sense.
If this does not satisfy your ‘technical urges’, let me make another point. Every call that is made, requires a little RAM, a little of CPU cycles and a little of bandwidth (Is this technical?). Well, yes, if you know that there is limit to the amount of RAM you can have on a single server and the cost of high end CPU. To make matters worse, suppose your hires are distributed across the world, you will be paying double for the bandwidth requirements. Now who says that saving your bandwidth is futile? Not Jane Of course!!