• Huge initial setup cost of the Call Center
• Expensive hardware
• Hiring experts on the product for maintenance and support
• Planning for scalability, which might result in buying expensive equipment in advance
• Strategy to Ramp up and Ramp down quickly
• Cost of minutes (Telecom minutes)

This is a partial list, but the list surely goes on and on. 3CLogic fits in brilliantly as a risk mitigating solution to these complex business problems because:

• There is no expensive hardware required. All an agent needs is a PC, headset and reliable Internet connection to carry out high performance call center tasks.
• With Hosted call center, no maintenance and support team required.
• Scalability – Contact center managers can increase or decrease the number of agents as and when required to fit business demands.
• Ramp up and Ramp down as per need. One does not need to invest in expensive hardware or more over purchase hardware that is never used.
• Choose a provider, who gives you the best deal!
• Keep many backup providers.
• Strategise least cost routing using multiple providers for multiple destinations- big saving!
• No infrastructure fees as agents and representatives can work from their own unique locations.
• Pay as you go option. Pay for what you need, and what you need only.

Well, Do I still hear someone say “Risk”

One of the clients who called us back was Oasis Marketing. Oasis Marketing does outbound calling. They wanted to run a 36 hour campaign over the weekend when we wanted to do maintenance. Another 3CLogic customer, Digital Bridge Communications based out of Ashburn, Virginia, was bracing for the blizzard of 2010 that weekend. They wanted their customer support folks to work from home while still providing the usual weekend coverage and support to their clients.

These were just few of the many examples, who could not have any kind of extended maintenance window even if it was pre-scheduled. 3CLogic quickly put a SWAT team in place, which started brainstorming ways to minimize or eliminate the downtime required for this extended maintenance window. Just as the blizzard moved into the DC metro area, we moved all the customers to backup servers. We took the production servers and started performing upgrades and maintenance on them. As soon as the maintenance was completed, we moved all the customers back to the upgraded servers. Result: Zero impact on our customers’ business. SaaS for mission critical application like call centers really means 99.999 up time.

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.

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.

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.

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.