Share what you know with millions of people

I have found pro's/con's (naturally) to using either a cloud-based call center solution or a traditional call center solution. As there are many moving parts to a functioning call center, much like the engine in your car you must always keep an eye on the "dashboard" to make sure the various moving parts & mechanicals are checking out/operating as they should. Here are a couple general thoughts below, please respond back if you'd like to dive into more detail in a specific facet.

Generally, I believe that primary reason/value-proposition of leveraging a "cloud-based" call center solution is to provide operational integrity, speed, & flexibility across multiple sites/large scale operational needs (especially if combining internal/external call centers to provide overall operational footprint). There should be IT efficiency gained in that the technologies required by each agent are in essence "pushed & administered" remotely by the IT administrators rather than having to go workstation to workstation across sites, etc. Training & QA as well as operations floor leaders will find value in knowing that ALL of their workstations/agents are accessing/leveraging the same tools -- therefore will require the same training & readiness coaching (rather than different training based on nuances in technology per site/center) to go from "new hire" to 100% productive agent. Depending on the details of the setup, there may very well be both some hard & soft cost-savings to be realized. (I'm NOT an IT expert, so if anyone with a strong CC IT background is following this thread please chime in and keep me honest!!)

If you are really talking smaller call center applications (i.e. 1 site or only a few workstations, no WAH agents, etc), in my experience the "cloud" call center solution may/may not add any significant differentiating value over a traditional setup. Again, maybe there are some IT perspectives that as a Sales/Marketing/Operations guys I'm overlooking here. So IT experts, feel free to clarify/add/etc.

-Brad Lindemann

Becky Mcginity

Technology Specialist, The Real PBX

Posted on Feb. 18, 2012

Hey Annie,
Let me share my experience with you. I have a medium sized business in Brisbane, Australia. My business is to provide cab facility to anyone in Queensland. People just need to call on my company’s support number. Hence a lot of calls (sometimes concurrent) are to be managed. I used to have a managed PBX for the above said purpose, but few months back my marketing team introduced me to the hosted PBX technology. Frankly, I was astonished at first because of the immense saving this strategy was projecting. We signed up with a Hosted PBX provider called The Real PBX who was providing a free trial for 2 weeks so we tried it out.

And let me tell you, frankly, initially we thought with such minimal setup cost we were not expecting such quality but surprisingly, we had a great experience, even our sales & support team were overwhelmed with the Quality of Service pertaining to such a low fee. Since then we have been in terms with the service provider, the response all my teams and department heads were giving led us to sign up for a yearly contract with them.

In case of emergency such as accidents or even in case of fire at my company’s premises, I wanted the availability of dialing such numbers. Also a lot of call drops were experienced which led to loss of potential clients. I wanted to open another branch of my company in Melbourne but with the same business number. Also I wanted the support number to be a toll-free number for the benefit of the people. Evidently, all these facilities are available from my Hosted PBX provider which allowed me to expand my business to other parts of the country.