CaaS – Predictability Brings Peace of Mind to Contact Center Deployments
CaaS – Predictability Brings Peace of Mind to Contact Center Deployments by Nancy Jamison
Note: This article is the last in a series. Also read:
Of the myriad benefits that we speak of which can be derived through a SaaS deployment - handling spikes in traffic, reducing OPEX, continual technology refresh, etc. - one doesn’t hear much about the attributes of these benefits that most resonate with customers. One key, important attribute of a SaaS deployment is predictability. When things are predictable, you can count on them, you can budget, you can plan. Predictability also brings stakeholders peace of mind.
What is so different in terms of predictability between a SaaS deployment and an on-premise enterprise deployment? After all, if you own your own equipment on site, don’t you have more control? The answer is yes and no. Certainly you have control over the physical hardware and customer data, but you have no control over when something will break, whether some event happens that suddenly causes a big uptick in incoming calls, whether a natural or manmade disaster will hit, or any other things that keep managers awake at night.
Interactive Intelligence’s Communication-as-a-Service (CaaS) helps eliminate, alleviate, or reduce many of the uncertainties that hit all businesses. Issues still arise, but using a hosted service can help you handle them in a more predictable fashion. Predictability resulting from using a hosted solution comes in many forms.
Service Level Agreements (SLA)
When an on-premise solution breaks, you fix it, and you pay for redundancy as insurance that you can keep your contact center up and running if something does happen. Predictability in this case comes at a cost. With a hosted solution you risk-share with the hosted provider, and a Service Level Agreement (SLA) should guarantee that those systems are up and running. SLAs can have real teeth. They address accountability in case something does happen, and what and if any penalties will be assessed. This brings peace of mind that even if the worst case scenario occurs and the contact center is impaired, there will be some financial relief built in.
Priced as Needed
Going with a CaaS solution has the added benefit of providing financial predictability on many fronts. Hosting allows you to pay a set amount up front to set up the application, but since the follow-on service is priced as needed, a CaaS solution means that you only pay for what you need and what you use. With built in maintenance, you aren’t stuck replacing broken equipment or suddenly incurring a cost to upgrade when a vendor makes something obsolete.
Scalability - Sized as Needed
No matter which hosted deployment model you chose, one of the most attractive attributes of a hosted solution is scalability. Even in industries with a fairly predictable level of incoming calls sometimes have instances where calls spike. It could be a natural disaster, a news event, political turmoil that cause traffic spikes, or it could be the opposite and something happens and call volume drops.
In some industries spikes are a way of life. Retail, insurance, and travel are notorious verticals for spikey call volume. Those once-a-year open enrollment periods for insurance companies, Valentine’s Day for florists, the holidays with retailers, and many times a year for travel and hospitality, all make the provisioning of the right amount of ports or agents a real budgetary dance. Do you provision for the highest call volume and pay the rest of the year or not? Similarly, if you provision for peak traffic and something occurs and call volumes are off, you are left holding that bag on all the cost of that unused equipment.
Reliability
In a typical hosted deployment, the service provider maintains a fully redundant operation, including fully redundant data centers. As is the case with CaaS, applications are deployed from a Tier 4 data center with full redundancy, providing reliable and predictable service.
Another component of this reliability is that the service is covered 24/7/365 so that there are service technicians on-site at all hours, which provides yet another predictability factor, in that you can schedule moves, adds and changes, updates to call flows, or other maintenance items, when you want it to occur, rather than fitting it into a smaller time frame, such as you might have if you were working on your own site, without 24-hour coverage.
Further if reliable voice quality is a pain point for you, Interactive Intelligence’s local control VoIP model might work for you. The local control VoIP model lets you keep your Telco trunks, gateways, proxy and media servers, and your IP phones on site, and access the CIC server as a virtual machine in Interactive Intelligence’s data center. So not only do you have control of your voice traffic, customer data, and recordings, if for some reason the CIC server is unavailable, you can still keep your contact center up and running on your site and you keep your voice on your network. You don’t have to pass it between the service provider and your network. That gives you the best of both worlds – cloud and premise.
Summary
With many attractive attributes in a hosted model, it’s no wonder that there is so much talk, innovation, and growth in cloud deployments. In this series Lisa Pierce, talked about flexibility as an attribute of a hosted solution, and Andy Zmolek discussed security. I believe that predictability cannot be undersold.
Keep in mind that SaaS and CaaS is not for everyone. You need to weigh what is important to you as there are benefits and advantages to both on-premise and hosted options. Further, not all predictability attributes are equal either. For example, with reliability, if voice quality is high on your list local control may be your best choice, but you then are more responsible for more of the pieces yourself. If you prefer to have someone else handle more, then maybe not.
In any case, And there are a variety of hosted providers out there, Interactive Intelligence is just one we highlighted in this article. Figure out what your business goals and constraints are, and which provider can best meet them.
This paper is sponsored by Interactive Intelligence.