Cutting Call Center Costs with Cloud Based Solutions

By Neil Zawacki
Updated: August 19, 2011

Front & Sullivan recently published a study titled: “Premise vs. Hosted Contact Center: Total Cost of Ownership Analysis.” It found that call centers can lower costs by 43 percent over a five year period if they decide to adopt a cloud-based solution instead of installing the equipment on site.

Why is this the case? There are several distinct reasons:

The first is the overall price of the system. Call center hardware can be quite expensive, especially if it needs to handle a large number of agents at the same time. Cloud-based solutions are remarkable cheap to obtain, however. The call center simply pays a flat fee each month (or year, if the vendor offers an annual contract) to gain access to the solution.

Cloud-based solutions also tend to cost far less to implement than a physical system. You simply download the software onto the computers and gain immediate access to call center program. Traditional systems require people to travel out to your place of business and install the hardware for a substantial fee.

Maintenance costs are also significantly reduced (and often non-existent) with cloud-based solutions. The hosting company performs the maintenance on the hardware and makes sure that everything is functioning properly. If an expensive piece of equipment needs to be replaced, it’s their responsibility to do so, not the call center’s.

Another way that call centers can save money is through the lower cost of upgrades. It’s much cheaper to modify and improve the system since everything is done through the cloud. The call center will stay up-to-date and be able to interoperate with all the latest software and technology.

Cloud-based solutions also do not have per-agent, per-month fees like most traditional systems. These can quickly add up at a call center and whittle away at the profits it would otherwise be making.

One final thing to keep in mind with cloud-based solutions - the larger the call center, the greater the savings. Frost & Sullivan’s study indicated that 100-seat call centers saved an average of 23 percent, 250-seat call centers saved an average of 34 percent, and 500-seat call centers saved an average 43 percent.

You can thus hire as many call center agents as you like without worrying that you’re going to break the bank. It’s actually to your advantage to do so since you are getting a significant return on investment. More agents turn into more profit, and more success for the call center.