The Inner Circle Guide to Cloud-Based Contact Centre … · That cloud-based contact centre...

The Inner Circle Guide to Cloud-Based Contact Centre Solutions

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2

CONTENTS

Introduction: Why is Cloud computing hot? .......................................................................................................... 4

Drivers for Cloud-based Contact Centre Solutions ................................................................................................. 6

Financial .............................................................................................................................................................. 7

Operational ....................................................................................................................................................... 16

Functionality ..................................................................................................................................................... 21

Strategic Considerations ................................................................................................................................... 24

Inhibitors ........................................................................................................................................................... 26

Cloud-based Contact Centre Solutions: Terminology ........................................................................................... 41

Implementation and Use ...................................................................................................................................... 46

Deciding on cloud ......................................................................................................................................... 46

Choosing a vendor ........................................................................................................................................ 50

Estimating ROI and TCO ................................................................................................................................ 54

Implementation Timings ............................................................................................................................... 56

Results of Using Cloud-based Solutions........................................................................................................ 59

Market Landscape ................................................................................................................................................ 61

Pricing and Contracts ........................................................................................................................................ 63

Key market sectors ........................................................................................................................................... 66

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................................ 69

The Vendor Community .................................................................................................................................... 70

Altitude Software .......................................................................................................................................... 71

Enghouse Interactive .................................................................................................................................... 72

Five9 ............................................................................................................................................................. 74

Gage Networks ............................................................................................................................................. 76

Interactive Intelligence® ............................................................................................................................... 77

LiveOps ......................................................................................................................................................... 79

NewVoiceMedia ........................................................................................................................................... 81

Noble Systems .............................................................................................................................................. 83

Ultra Communications .................................................................................................................................. 85

The Supplier Directory .......................................................................................................................................... 87

Appendix: Vendor responses to questions ........................................................................................................... 93

About ContactBabel ............................................................................................................................................ 114

3

Table of figures

Figure 1: Capex and Opex changes in UK & US contact centres, 2011 ................................................................... 8

Figure 2: Contact centre operating expenditure in UK & US, 2011 ...................................................................... 10

Figure 3: What concerns do you have about cloud or hosted solutions? ............................................................ 26

Figure 4: Characteristics of businesses choosing cloud and CPE .......................................................................... 46

Figure 5: Have cloud-based solutions made any difference? ............................................................................... 59

Figure 6: If you use this functionality, is it delivered through a cloud/hosted solution? ..................................... 61

Figure 7: Pricing examples .................................................................................................................................... 63

4

INTRODUCTION: WHY IS CLOUD COMPUTING HOT?

Having technology provided and managed by a third-party away from a customer's premises is not a new idea, with service bureaux and ASPs (application service providers) being around for many years. PBX functionality through Centrex has been available since the 1960s, with IVR and ACD functionality often being offered through a network provider too. In the past few years, SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solutions such as Salesforce.com offer desktop functionality for the contact centre, and many solution providers now offer convincing, rich-featured applications hosted in the cloud.

That cloud-based contact centre solutions are now 'hot' is down to a mixture of factors, including the recession's negative effect on capital investment, the increasing functionality of hosted applications, and the proven success and general acceptance of cloud-based solutions. Additionally, the stranglehold that incumbent CPE telephony providers had on the industry has been loosened by the advent of IP and more open systems, with the net result being a greater choice of solution providers.

The maturity of Western contact centre markets, coupled with the high levels of mergers and acquisitions in industries such as utilities, telecoms, insurance and finance mean that many large companies are now in a position where they provide customer contact via multiple sites, often running on disparate technologies. Cloud-based contact centre solutions allow a way out of proprietary systems, lack of interoperability and the expense of maintaining many different systems without gaining from economies of scale. For example, only 28% of multisite UK operations ran as truly virtual contact centres in 2011, although the US equivalent was greater, at 49%. The main reason stated that 51% of US multisite operations stayed non-virtualised was that there were too many different systems at each location to work together: a problem that cloud-based contact centre solutions address.

The general lack of investment within the past few years is now showing in many contact centres, yet capital expenditure is still not forthcoming. The avoidance of large capital investments, and reduced start-up costs associated with cloud solutions is of great interest to many organisations, as is the reduced risk of trialling new functionality, and inherent future-proofing that cloud offers through frequent technology upgrades.

Personal and efficient customer service is the lifeblood of

any organisation and NewVoiceMedia’s ContactWorld and

ContactWorld for Salesforce makes every customer’s

telephone interaction a great experience, at a fraction

of the cost of traditional systems.

Business Benefits of ContactWorld:• Always available: Market leading 99.999%

availability delivered from UK data centres.

• Greater flexibility: Customise, react, adapt and

scale quickly and easily.

• Simpler management: No requirement for IT

specialists and engineers.

• Increased visibility: Get a real-time window into

your entire operation.

• Cost efficiency: No capital outlay, scalable contact

centre that suits your business and budget needs.

• Multi-tenant infrastructure: Functionality available

to all users.

• Improved support: Dedicated experts available

24/7 to respond to queries.

NewVoiceMedia is currently active in 28 countries

with over 140 customers.

Let your customers do the talking

Start Listening

+44 207 206 8888www.newvoicemedia.com

http://www.newvoicemedia.com

6

DRIVERS FOR CLOUD-BASED CONTACT CENTRE SOLUTIONS

The many potentially-positive factors driving the uptake of cloud-based solutions can be grouped into four areas: Financial, Functional, Operational and Strategic:

• Financial: how does cloud affect the investment and ongoing expenditure connected with technology and the operations of the contact centre?

• Functional: what is the effect of cloud-based solutions on the functionality available to the contact centre?

• Operational: what are the changes in the way in which the contact centre is able to operate?

• Strategic: how are wider concerns of the business addressed by having contact centre functionality within the cloud?

7

FINANCIAL

Cloud-based solutions are sometimes thought of as having a ‘pay-as-you-go’ financial model that allows business of all sizes to move away from high front-end expenditures in favour of a more manageable operational expenditure approach without any overspending. While some solution providers offer this, to varying extents, it is by no means universal. It is perhaps better to consider the financial opportunities of cloud as being related more to shifting expenditure from capital expenditure (Capex) to operational expenditure (Opex)

Small and mid-size companies in particular typically do not have the ready access to cash to make the necessary capital expenditures for expensive CPE. As a result, making the shift from Capex to Opex is especially relevant for these firms. Recently, poor economic conditions have affected companies and finances, and some organisations that would have been previously less likely to have considered Opex investments (e.g. public sector, utilities companies) are now doing so, as many large Capex projects have been shelved indefinitely.

Cloud offers contact centres a way forwards without relying on capital investment:

• Businesses can scale down future customer premises equipment (CPE) investment, with a resulting decrease in capital expenditure

• There is also an opportunity to buy services using a pay-per-use or even pay-as-you-talk pricing model, which helps to keep operating expenses to a minimum

• Additionally, issues surrounding the total cost of ownership of CPE do not arise with hosted solutions: outright purchase of equipment isn’t for everyone, perhaps for reasons of budget or the ability to maintain the systems

• Low-risk ability to start up or move or expand without risking existing business plans • Businesses retain the freedom to downscale change targets and plans to meet demand, rather than commit

themselves to long-term arrangements needed to justify the purchase approach of high value CPE.

8

Figure 1: Capex and Opex changes in UK & US contact centres, 2011

Recent ContactBabel research carried out with more than 400 US and UK contact centre operations shows that investment levels and budgets are still in the doldrums. Almost 1 in 5 US operations had their investment budgets cut by more than 10% in 2011, even though many businesses believe that they have weathered the worst of the economic storm. These figures show that the cut in investment has not led to a loosening of the purse strings where Opex is concerned either, with a rough balance between those increasing and decreasing their ongoing spend.

2% 2% 6% 6%

18% 16% 8% 13%

25%

12%12% 6%

17%

30%49% 47%

27%24%

11% 20%

7%10% 11%

8%3% 6% 3% 1%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

UK Opex US Opex UK Capex US Capex

Capex and Opex changes in 2011 (UK & US)

Increased by 25%+

Increased by 10-25%

Increased by <10%

No change

Decreased by < 10%

Decreased by 10-25%

Decreased by 25%+

Our solution delivers all the benefits of million-dollar systems, but without their hidden costs. Contact centers around the world count on Five9’s cloud-based contact center software to reduce operational cost, improve customer satisfaction, and enable flexible staffing—at home, onshore and offshore.

To get started with Five9, simply visit our website at www.Five9.com to view a demo or start a free trial.

You may also call us directly at 1-800-553-8159.

1,500+ Customers

Two Billion Calls Annually

100+ Engineers

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Looking in more depth at Opex, we can see that it is typical for total salaries to account on average for around 70% of a contact centre's Opex, with much smaller elements spent on IT, telecoms, training etc.

Figure 2: Contact centre operating expenditure in UK & US, 2011

In current circumstances, we can see that for many businesses Capex is tight or non-existent, and Opex budgets are rising very slowly, if at all. The positive financial impact of cloud-based solutions is built on shifting from Capex to Opex, but the question is: if Opex is also closely-controlled, surely a business won't countenance a big jump in spend, even if it is shifted into a monthly operating budget? If this is true, it is worth considering how a movement from CPE to cloud-based solutions could impact on expenditure in each of these Opex categories, thus reducing or substituting existing expenditure within the Opex budget and freeing up budget with which to pay the cloud provider.

Agent salaries:

At 57% of Opex, any small change in salaries will make a large impact on overall spend. At first glance, shifting technology from CPE to cloud doesn't look like it will impact on agents at all. However, moving to cloud means that companies can be more flexible in their staffing arrangements, either through having agents in lower-cost locations (either onshore or offshore), and by supporting a more volume-driven staffing schedule (e.g. by having homeworkers log on for short shifts when they are needed, rather than the full eight hours). Seasonality is also addressed, through being able to add and shed agents as needed. Cloud offers various ways to reduce or otherwise manage overall salary costs, through contact centre virtualisation in all of its forms.

Agent salaries57.0%Other

salaries (e.g. management

& IT)13.4%

Rent4.8%

Telecoms charges4.7%

IT maintenance3.6%

Training3.2%

Utilities & local taxes2.6%

Recruitment2.3%

Other8.5%

Contact centre operating expenditure, US & UK, 2011

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Other salaries (e.g. management & IT):

Businesses can experience a decrease in development costs and attendant IT management salaries, as cloud solution providers will already have solutions up and running. Moving physical hardware off-site also means that maintenance requirements will no longer be an issue for the contact centre.

Furthermore, for multisite operations, moving to the cloud will offer greater opportunities for having a single-cross-site management team in place, with call routing and self-service controlled at a single point, reducing management costs as well as improving consistency and increasing the available labour pool. Infrastructure and processes which are held in the cloud can avoid issues which CPE resources can experience, such as unnecessary duplication across multiple sites and a corresponding increase in management costs for configuration, administration and performance checking.

Rent, utilities & local taxes:

Although businesses are usually tied into contracts for their premises, a cloud approach to technology means that a growing business can look for value elsewhere if a new operation is to open; or a contract break occurs, without the upheaval and downtime associated with moving on-site hardware to another location. Moving equipment to the cloud will reduce energy expenditure.

Telecoms charges:

Call queuing at the network level also saves money. In multi-site operations - rather than pass a call down to a contact centre which may not have an agent immediately available to take the call – it makes sense to queue the call at the network level until an agent is capable and available to take it. The call is then passed – once – to the agent in the specific contact centre.

IT maintenance:

Cloud-based solutions can mean that the need for large server farms is reduced or removed, lowering the cost of hardware and maintenance. Software upgrades are carried out at a network-level, reducing cost and upheaval.

Training & Recruitment:

Cloud does not offer a great deal of opportunity for saving costs on training, although there may be some opportunity for recruitment savings based on having the ability to locate contact centres or homeworkers anywhere, including in lower cost areas.

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Other expenditure:

Apart from these instances of reduced Opex, cloud offers other opportunities to cut down on unnecessary expenditure, including:

• Operations with fluctuating traffic (either on a seasonal or more frequent basis) do not have to buy sufficient software licences and telephone line capacity to cover the peaks, as many cloud providers offer the possibility of adding short-term licences on a pay-as-you-go basis

• The cloud allows users cost savings associated with not having to own or run their own hardware. Although servers may be a commodity purchase, the energy costs involved in running them can far outweigh the initial purchase and 85% of computing power generally sits idle in any case.

13

End-user question: "Where do the biggest cost savings come from?" (Utilities company)

Cost savings are slightly different from business to business: outsourcers primarily save cost by having a fully flexible pay-per-usage fee – when production volumes are high, and more revenue is normally generated, the cost for the technical platform is higher,

whilst the cost is lower when production volumes are low, and less revenue is generated. To be able to cut back, without having a fixed cost for the technical platform equates to major savings – as well as much less risk to manage – for an outsourcer. For the enterprise user, that tends to have a much more stable volume, the major savings come from being able to downsize or even eliminate internal IT costs. With no need for keeping and maintaining skills and resources in-house, and user interfaces optimised for operational staff the cost savings are very significant. Other very important savings come from turning Capex into Opex.

Timescales – In a traditional contact centre project you can be looking at least a year cycle from requirements, procurement to delivery. Cloud allows you to react quickly to changes in the market and not think about the size of contact centre but rather strategy,

which gives cost savings in line with your bottom line strategy. Property / resource – a public cloud environment eliminates in-house hardware investment, as well as related IT infrastructure, maintenance and upgrade expenses, driving savings. In the same way within the private cloud you can log on from any environment so you are not tied to a place, you can expand into new markets easily within extended scalability. Functionality – Having a unified cloud contact centre platform it gives the access to all contact centre elements, which can be access from anywhere. The cost is reduced without having to purchase individual boxes and interconnect.

While ROI and TCO varies by company and industry, the biggest cost savings from cloud-based contact centre software are typically in:

1. Reduced long-term (3-5 year) license fees due to flexible monthly billing (pay only for what you need) 2. Significantly reduced one-time deployment and implementation costs, since there is little or no

hardware 3. Lower IT operational costs, since IT resources can focus on enhancing business operations rather than

administering hardware and software architecture 4. Improved agent productivity, particularly when the superior integration capabilities of cloud-based

solutions are utilised to unify contact centre and CRM systems.

Based on a utility pricing model Cloud delivery realises real cost savings with no significant capital expenditure, no set up fees and no need for a dedicated IT team to

maintain the system. This simple pay per seat pricing structure provides a flexible and cost effective service helping businesses eliminate wastage by only paying for what they use. A fully managed secure global solution for video and voice, brings Telephony, Contact Centre and Video Conferencing together under a single invoice, supplier and point of contact. With only endpoints at each customer site you don't need to worry about ISDN lines, number ranges, service providers, capacity, servers or PBXs. A Cloud Communications solution allows global companies, on average, to consolidate eight suppliers into one single supplier, one bill and one point of contact, saving an estimated 25 hours per month on supplier management alone.

http://www.five9.com

http://www.gagenetworks.com

http://www.enghouseinteractive.com

http://www.altitude.com

14

End-user question: "Where do the biggest cost savings come from?" (Utilities company)

Cost savings really depend on your existing environment and planned approach. We encourage companies to compare financial impacts of both cloud and premise models, in order to round out the view across a given period. The answer is always in the details. Human capital is expensive and cloud solutions require fewer resources to operate, in

general. However, what’s interesting is that most companies we speak to don’t end up reducing headcount when moving to the cloud, but will re-focus resources to address strategic imperatives or initiatives that have been under-resourced previously. The drivers for the cloud have gone well beyond financial benefits: companies are looking to leverage the cloud to increase flexibility (e.g., dynamically and economically scale up and down to address seasonality and growth), speed up deployment times, and free-up IT staff for other work.

The biggest cost savings will come from converting a capital expenditure to an operating expenditure. Additionally, companies can reduce the number of in-house resources

required to operate and maintain these systems. On average the majority of savings realized in the first year are elimination of maintenance costs. Most organizations are able to achieve a roughly 30-40% decrease in TCO. Finally, most companies can be up and running in the cloud in days rather than months, another significant savings.

Multi-tenancy and IP ownership offer the biggest cost advantage. The ability of the provider to deliver greater utilisation of hardware and operational costs

through true cloud and multi-tenancy ensures a lower per customer cost. The cost for an individual company to build and maintain an infrastructure that delivers equivalent functionality is significantly more, not to mention the costs of redundancy, security and performance, which are all included in the Cloud providers pricing. True Cloud is also significant; True cloud providers build and maintain their own code base. This is important as there are no licence fees to pay to the software providers, allowing Cloud vendors to amortise development costs over their entire user base; in addition owning the software allows true cloud vendors to make continual feature improvements to their service, with updates as often as every 2 weeks. Companies who use a mixture from different vendors of on premise Contact Centre technologies will be paying (both time and cost) to keep software levels compatible between products, however using a single cloud provider this is a problem and cost that does not exist. Other cost savings come from administration, hardware and software maintenance, infrastructure costs (power, cooling, etc) and management (patches, upgrades, testing, etc), redundancy and security.

Noble's clients have indicated that the top cost savings from using our hosted solution come from removal of multiple service providers, less expensive

network solutions and reduced IT demands.

Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) vendors normally charge 15-20% of original licence costs simply to maintain their solutions - and support is typically a reactive service triggered by the occurrence of problem events, with inherent delays in analysis and correction of faults. Support models provided by pay-as-you-use Cloud vendors such as

Ultra are very different. Rather than charge an annual maintenance fee, support charges are frequently based on productive usage of Cloud services and the number of people concurrently using services. With revenues based on clients’ productive use of services, support personnel are highly motivated to address support issues well within the timescales published in Service Level Agreements. This can lead to huge cost savings.


http://www.noblesys.com

http://www.ultraasp.net

http://www.inin.com

http://www.liveops.com

16

OPERATIONAL

On a day-to-day basis, cloud-based contact centre solutions can theoretically offer a better service level and a simpler environment for businesses to operate in.

Reduced need for IT support and implementation:

Having hardware and software based in the cloud means that ongoing system maintenance is significantly reduced, as it is the duty of the cloud provider to handle such matters. This is also the case in terms of implementing new systems, with users generally stated to be up and running in days, although of course the level of customisation is often far less than that in a CPE environment with dedicated IT and business resource available.

Larger pool of agents to choose from:

Treating multiple contact centres as a virtual contact centre allows great efficiencies to be made through economies of scale. This is especially true where businesses are using skills-based routing. All agent competencies are displayed to the scheduler – regardless of agent location - who can be more flexible, simply because the available resource pool is so much more deep.

Short-term scalability:

The cloud offers great flexibility in adding or shedding agents and user licences, of particular relevance to businesses which have substantial changes in call volumes over a year (such as the seasonality experienced by retailers and travel agents) or which have to react quickly to handle event-driven call spikes (e.g. an emergency weather-drive situation affecting utilities companies).

Scalability is key: many contact centres want to be able to gear up and down to suit business demands and cope with peaks and troughs without unnecessary expenditure, and with cloud-based solutions they can do this on a daily basis if necessary, instead of spending on capacity that they may not use for months.

Centralised management:

In a multi-site, cloud-based environment, self-service and call routing scripts can be held centrally to increase the speed to alter these as required, and also to maintain consistency across sites. Infrastructure and processes which are held in the cloud can avoid issues which CPE resources can experience, such as unnecessary duplication across multiple sites and a corresponding increase in management costs for configuration, administration and performance checking.

Case Study

SHL Shows a Talent for Customer Care using NewVoiceMedia Cloud Contact Centre Solution

SHL provides behavioral and ability assessment tools and services in 30 languages. The company’s mission is to demonstrably improve the effectiveness of organisations through objective measurement, and with operations in more than 50 countries and across more than 30 languages, SHL supports people decisions in more languages and more countries than any other talent management provider. Headquartered in the U.K., SHL was founded in 1977 and serves up to 10,000 customers globally each year.

Historically, SHL supported its customers via service desks in more than 20 offices worldwide. This not only proved expensive to operate, it also made it very difficult to deliver a consistently compelling and rewarding service experience, and there was no analytical reporting mechanism to evaluate the effectiveness of the global operation.

Provide consistency of support and optimise efficiency

Challenged to restructure costs and revaluate service standards, SHL decided to bring its service desk offering in-house in a bid to provide consistency of support and optimise efficiency. Many of the offices had as few as two call handlers, and it was not commercially viable to sustain this modus operandi. To this end, SHL took the strategic decision to consolidate its service desks from the multiple, fragmented environments to just three: one in Stockholm (to service the Nordics customer base), one in the U.K. to support European, Middle east, and Asia Pacific customers and one in the U.S. dedicated to the North and South America market. A South African hub followed later and was brought on line in less than 48 hours. All would use uniform standards and processes.

SHL also wanted a system which would process calls seamlessly round the clock from more than 20 countries into the U.K. hub; agents also needed the flexibility to recognise where the call was coming from prior to the customer engagement. However, according to Jag Tucker, Global Front Office Operations Manager, SHL, one of the most demanding requirements was time to market. “To ensure we delivered a consistently rewarding service experience, we wanted the solution to be deployed within an eight weeks timeframe – from design to implementation,” he says. “It also had to meet robust budget targets and disaster recovery objectives.”

SHL selected the ContactWorld platform , an enterprise class contact centre, delivered via a true cloud model, by NewVoiceMedia. The solution seamlessly integrates telephony to Salesforce CRM—the bedrock of SHL’s customer relationship management (CRM) strategy. Unlike a traditional contact centre, where the hardware can be expensive and takes months to implement, SHL’s hosted contact centre implementation uses a remote cloud-based telephony system to provide the links and call plan intelligence between the caller and agent. SHL didn’t need to pay out any additional capital expenditure; it was able to only pay for what it uses ‘on-demand’. There are also no hidden costs for maintenance as NewVoiceMedia takes full responsibility for the infrastructure. “NewVoiceMedia’s cloud computing approach made all the difference,” says Jag. “They could number source globally and port or redirect any of the existing SHL numbers to any one of their platforms. The company was willing to meet our time frame of eight weeks from design to implementation, and their costs were considerably less than traditional on-premise providers.”

Increased efficiency and improved caller experience

Inbound calls are announced to the agent with a link to the caller’s details; and customer data held in Salesforce is used to intelligently route calls to the most appropriate agent or team. This dramatically increases SHL’s efficiency and improves the caller experience. The SHL UK agents collectively speak more than 30 languages; ContactWorld for Salesforce identifies the region a call is coming from and directs it to the appropriate agent which speaks that language. This allows SHL to provide a world class call centre to support their business. “ContactWorld for Salesforce gives SHL agents a single, easy to use interface to manage calls and customer contact information,” Jag explains. “Value-based routing functionality gets the right agent talking to the caller the first time; returning callers can be prioritised in any queue; and the SHL agents can schedule tasks to make outbound calls. Moreover, individual caller treatments make the caller feel special and increase up-selling/cross-selling opportunities.”

Significant benefits from using ContactWorld

By standardising on the NewVoiceMedia cloud-based contact centre solution, SHL has been rewarded with a raft of other benefits:

• Increased agent satisfaction: SHL has experienced only four percent staff turnover since introducing ContactWorld for Salesforce • More than 90% of calls answered within 20 seconds globally • Led to average 1.3 percent call abandon rate • Reduced average call waiting time to only 14 seconds globally • Achieved 95 percent first time resolution • Led to speedier calls and informed greeting to a known customer before they have given any contact details • All intelligent voice recognition (IVR) voice prompts have been transformed to a new streamlined approach with professional

recording artists • Reliable service delivery: calls can be redirected seamlessly anywhere in the world in a few clicks

18

End-user question: "Does cloud make it any easier to implement virtual contact centres or multichannel/ social media? If so, how?" (Retailer)

Yes. In our cloud solution, deploying a virtual contact centre is very similar to any other deployment. As soon as the site – or even an individual user – is securely connected to

the platform there is no difference between a single- and multiple-site operation. Multimedia channels including social media are available in Altitude uCI, which is the platform for our cloud offering.

Yes, a number of our customers use cloud to try new media channel and/ or integration with social media – With full visibility and reporting across and entire operations and channels, with everything measured so allowing future informed decisions on channel strategy.

Cloud-based contact centre software is clearly an enabling technology for virtual contact centres. Since there's no hardware or software to install and maintain, users can be located anywhere in the world – all they need is a workstation, USB headset, and high-speed internet

connection. Since all users are served via the cloud, daily operations for a virtual contact centre are usually dramatically easier – e.g., supervisors can view their team or all agents regardless of location.

A Cloud Contact Centre is ideal for providing a true unified and global contact centre because the functionality is located centrally, away from one particular site. This

enables advanced features to be deployed elegantly without complex and potentially unreliable call flows whilst minimising single points of failure, including queuing in the cloud to look for agent status across multiple locations before routing a call, Follow-the-sun routing capability, intelligent routing plans such as skills based routing which prioritises agents based on training – whatever their location - and rich management information available real-time and historically from anywhere in the world.

It certainly can as the cloud makes it easy to turn-up these types of services. Technology is no longer the gating factor – it’s a question of how ready your business is from an organisational and process perspective. Certain cloud providers have industry leading consultants available to help you answer those questions and put best practices in place to ensure a successful deployment.

The cloud contact centre IS the virtual contact centre so for these purposes they are one in the same. Both Social Media and multimedia are seamlessly integrated in the cloud

via open API’s. LiveOps recently released our new Social Application, which is fully integrated with Facebook and Twitter, providing real time social feeds into the agent’s dashboard for immediate review and response.



http://www.inin.com




19

End-user question: "Does cloud make it any easier to implement virtual contact centres or multichannel/ social media? If so, how?" (Retailer)

The answer is a 100% yes. Typically a cloud based contact centre is the central location where all calls, emails etc are delivered to. Therefore distribution of calls to any sites can be achieved simply by knowing the phone number or

browser where the agent is located. Once it has been established what skill is required for the call or other media type then it doesn't matter where the agent is located as long as a phone and network path exists to send the contact.

One of the advantages of the cloud is the increased ease for implementing virtual contact centres. Clients can add remote agents or additional contact centres in just days or weeks depending on their planning and execution. In

the cloud, rather than waiting to install new hardware, clients simply purchase additional lines and/or agents, which can be quickly ‘turned on’, and the agent can be set up, trained and off and running. Social Media is a rapidly growing communications channel for consumers. Forums and communities offer a quick and accessible way for customers to share their opinions and experiences, including their complaints or displeasure. Managing this new resource for customer contacts is increasingly important in today’s on-demand culture. Noble® Social Media enables you to integrate social networking into your overall customer communications strategies, allowing you to create a responsive program within your contact centre and to expand the reach of your customer service programs. This implementation of social media within the contact centre would be the same on a hosted or premise based solution.

The distributed nature of Cloud technology – with servers typically replicated in multiple telecom buildings and connected to multiple Telcos and Internet Service Providers – means it’s as easy to support advisors working from a remote office as it is those working

in a traditional contact centre. The distributed nature of Cloud technology also more readily enables ‘one number contactability’ services where users state where they are working from on a particular day and the Cloud service will find them. Another advantage of Cloud services is that connectivity is very simple. In the case of Ultra, advisors require only a standard telephone (DDI, landline or mobile), an Internet connection and an ActiveX component to log into Ultra’s Cloud platform.




Case Study

SNAP-‐ON TOOLS: LIVEOPS® GENERATES NEW REVENUE AND THOUSANDS OF NEW ORDERS AT SNAP-‐ON TOOLSAs one of the world’s largest suppliers of professional tools and equipment, Snap-‐on Tools’ success hinges largely on its ability to engage and sell-‐in to franchisee agents. This task was complicated by the fact that the 400+ agents are independent, on the move and span the UK, Ireland and Holland.

In the past, sales teams would

mention offers in their calls or the

marketing department would send

emails, requiring the franchisees to

call the contact center to place an

order. The process was ineffective

– franchisees didn’t always read the

emails; and it was costly -‐ calls to

place orders required a full contact

center and manual order taking.

The company turned to LiveOps to

consider alternative ways to engage

franchisees. LiveOps implemented

LiveOps Social™, a solution which

allows Snap-‐on to easily send out

SMS messages with special offers.

Franchisees receive the messages

in a timely fashion and can make

immediate orders via SMS. The

entire process is managed by one

person and it takes only minutes to

send out the promotion and seconds

to receive orders. The solution has

enhanced communications with

franchisees and in the first five

months has generated nearly 3,600

orders worth more than £230,000 –

all by SMS and without the need for

sales or contact center agents.

Snap-‐on Tools faced several

business challenges:

» Costly and ineffective communi-‐

cations with franchisees.

Special offers were promoted as

part of sales calls or via emails

requiring a call to place an order.

It was impossible to reach all the

400+ franchisees and sales were

poor.

» Inefficient ordering processes.

Franchisees didn’t always receive

the promotions and then were

required to phone the contact

center to place orders; agents

manually processed orders, taking

days and increasing errors.

LiveOps Solution

Snap-‐on Tools implemented the

LiveOps Social for:

» Two-‐way SMS communication.

SMS broadcasts to franchise

dealers; and SMS Ordering by

franchisees

The solution allowed franchisees to

easily view promotions and place

orders by SMS; at the contact

center, the process is now managed

by one person, with orders auto-‐

matically consolidated and

processed for dispatch and billing.

Business Benefits

Snap-‐on Tools experienced immedi-‐

ate ROI and benefits from LiveOps

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received and only require a reply

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» Increased sales. Special offers

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while agents are “in the field”.

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Generated nearly 3,600 orders and more than £230,000 in new sales in the first five months – all by SMS and without sales or contact center agents.

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21

FUNCTIONALITY

Cloud-based applications may allow businesses greater opportunities to implement new technology, a point of particular importance to the traditionally-overlooked mid-sized contact centre sector.

Trial new applications quickly using a low-risk pilot:

Contact centres can expand, move, increase size or try out new functionality without the high initial set-up costs. Using a pay-per-use model allows businesses to start a contact centre or move at low risk or increase for a temporary campaign or try out new functionality without having to spend excessive amounts of time and money first. This is especially true for new and usually expensive applications such as speech recognition which can be a very expensive solution to implement at a CPE level.

The hybrid cloud model (a mixture of CPE and cloud) is often used to migrate existing applications to the cloud once the decision to upgrade or replace existing CPE functionality is made.

Amongst the biggest gainers from cloud technology are mid-sized contact centres, a market which many vendors have been failing to address for a great number of years. Solution providers which have deep and rich functionality aimed at the high-end of the market have been reluctant or unable to offer similar features to smaller operations at a price point that is acceptable to both parties. Cloud-based solutions mean that this market becomes potentially profitable to vendors: for example, the customisation of cloud-based offerings can be far less, which means that overall cost for the smaller operations is less than in a CPE environment, as vendors gain from the economies of scale associated with multi-tenancy.

Future-proof:

A competitive, open cloud environment should mean that vendors will be motivated to innovate and provide better service. Cloud solution providers have continually to enhance and develop their services which bestows a competitive advantage to business users who can deploy the latest technology and the often inherent advantages of improved functionality, service and reduced costs, through their contact centres. In effect, a hosted solution removes the technology stranglehold experienced by many contact centres with CPE and allows them to concentrate on their core business as this release of frequent new functionality can be used to achieve a strategic service advantage.

In a CPE environment, upgrades to applications are carried out under ongoing maintenance contracts. Upgrading one element may cause a knock-on effect requiring other applications to be upgraded as well, a task which can be long and expensive. Cloud-based providers update applications on an ongoing basis.

22

End-user question: "How does cloud-based functionality compare to on-premise?" (Large retailer)

Generally speaking, a cloud based solution is more standardised than an on-premise solution, but with the flexibility of Altitude Script Language, as well as a database driven

interface, the vast majority of requirements can be customised. Our cloud solution also has more out-of-the-box functionality ready to be used from day one, than an on-premise solution normally has.

The functionality is exactly the same, just where it is stored is different. It is easier to access and changes can be made more rapidly.

Leading cloud-based contact centre software vendors offer most or all of the features found in on-premise systems. Since the products are typically developed for the cloud, they often provide unified administration, seamless inbound/outbound blending, integrated IVR and ACD, unified contact history, and similar "unified" features.

It’s almost one-for-one. Functionality is rarely an inhibitor, especially if the cloud service is based on a market-leading contact centre platform that has thousands of customers running their operation on it.

Cloud-based functionality has significantly narrowed the gap with on-premise systems over the past couple of years. In some cases cloud-based advantages are found through

increased efficiencies by operating in the cloud like seamless integration and very flexible scalability.

Hosted contact centre services were primarily tailored for Small-to-Medium Businesses (SMBs), offering scaled-down features in exchange for convenience

and low cost-of-entry. Costly and fraught with delay, migration horror stories further defined hosted offerings as stop-gap solutions designed only for small organisations. ‘Right-sizing’ capabilities provide the best fit for smaller companies, the wide range of sophisticated features and functionality make them ideal for large enterprise organisations. You should achieve maximum productivity with outbound dialling, inbound ACD, blending, skills-based routing, IVR, call recording, agent and system monitoring, customisable agent workstations, workforce management (WFM), legislative compliance, results reporting, CRM/collection software integration, and more.

In theory, there is nothing a CPE solution can offer that can’t be replicated by a Cloud solution. Whether that is true in practice depends on the maturity of the Cloud solution. However, there are functions and services that Cloud solutions can offer that can’t be replicated by CPE solutions. Some Cloud vendors provide real-time performance

monitoring services – while most CPE solution vendors treat performance management as an historic (e.g. end-of-day) exercise. They can also typically deploy new functions and campaigns much quicker than CPE vendors, and also bring advanced services such as speech recognition and follow-me services within the reach of organisations that couldn’t otherwise afford them due to flexible pay-as-you-use payment models.


http://www.inin.com






Author: Colin Chave, General Manager EMEA Noble Systems

The Rise of the Enterprise Hosted Contact Centre Solution

For years, the hosted contact centre was defined as a ‘network-based service in which a service provider owns and operates a contact centre technology platform’. Yet for much of that time, users and industry-watchers understood that a vital piece of information was missing from that description: any comment on the depth, sophistication and functionality of the platform itself. Since its inception more than 15 years ago, hosted contact centre services were primarily tailored for Small-to-Medium Businesses (SMBs), offering scaled-down features in exchange for convenience and low cost-of-entry. Today, as the early adoption phase of the cloud-based contact centre solution fades into the past, a new breed of hosted offerings have redefined the value proposition and changed the game. Over the years, key differentiators between premise-based offerings and hosted solutions emerged: up-front investment, total-cost-of ownership, architecture and scale. Growing SMBs faced difficult choices through the early 2000’s, seeking to control overhead while enjoying the benefits of technological advancement more easily delivered through a PBX or premise-based architecture. By 2005, innovation in cloud-based services had progressed to a point of truly valuable differentiation and the marketplace saw a marked increase in adoption. New advantages to hosted services became clear: disaster recovery, integration of at-home or remote agents, future-proofing through automatic upgrades etc. Despite these advantages, the function and control portfolio remained well-behind available premise-based options. Now, business interest and supplier innovation have combined to generate significant momentum toward hosted services. Analysts have reported that industry revenues from hosted ACD reached more than $330 million in 2010 and are likely to grow at a rate of 13.2% to reach $795.3 million by 2017. However, some significant concerns remain the biggest barriers to the ultimate success of hosted contact centre solutions - limited functionality, long-term viability, difficulty of migration to a premise-based solution and total cost of ownership remain points of differentiation within the marketplace. An offering that addresses the following four key concerns – while delivering on support and innovation promises – will result in a solid value proposition to compete in the modern global marketplace: Feature Functionality: A world-class hosted provider must offer a unified agent desktop that allows agents to quickly and easily navigate billing systems, knowledge bases, multiple products and interfaces. Moreover, that same system must utilise fast, responsive tools for management to set up campaigns, determine pacing, monitor agents and maximise overall efficiency. Finally, the platform must offer robust data capturing and reporting features that track activities in real-time and measure results. Business Continuity: In a recent survey of contact centre managers commissioned by Noble Systems, more than 20 percent of the participants indicated that they did not know what would happen to their customer data in the event of a catastrophe that compromised their facility. Some even responded with certainty that it would be lost forever. For many SMB organisations, data loss and customer privacy are day-to-day concerns that must be addressed thoroughly and carefully. A hosted solution with the right vendor can meet business continuity needs through failsafe systems that ensure the safety and security of all information. Scalability: From the days of their first availability, a primary advantage to hosted solutions was the flexibility that allowed users to scale operations to meet changing needs. That need is no less important today and in many cases, more so. As the global contact centre industry becomes more fragmented and location-agnostic, businesses are experiencing diverging workflows and require a flexible solution. Hosted-to-Premise Migration: The hosted-to-premise migration is a key potential transition in the life of a contact centre operation – even if there is no perceived need for such a transition at the present time. A variety of needs and variables may arise to make such a change advantageous, but many companies realise this only to discover that it will be cost-prohibitive, disruptive to customer care, lengthy, or all of the above. In Conclusion:

It seems apparent that the hosted contact centre landscape has made a significant shift in recent years from an SMB-focused, out-of-the-box tool to a mature, enterprise-ready solution. Savvy businesses are capitalising on the shift and seeking new platforms that offer rich feature functionality, flexibility and a clear path to future enhancements and applications.

24

STRATEGIC CONSIDERATIONS

Apart from the day-to-day improvements in the functionality and operations that cloud-based solutions can provide, wider impacts have to be considered as well.

Disaster recovery:

Ensuring business continuity during outages, facility emergencies and inclement weather is a critical requirement. Cloud-based contact centre models ensure business continuity by enabling agents to be connected to the technology platform and necessary applications from anywhere with Internet access. Even in an outage, companies maintain the ability to service and sell to the client base, undermining what could otherwise be a disastrous situation resulting in lost revenue, dropped calls and negative customer experiences. Cloud solutions eliminate the costly and time-intensive process of building and maintaining a back-up site from which to take calls and deal with emergency situations, and superior solutions are fully-redundant, with complete disaster recovery and business continuance delivered from multi-site locations.

Cloud solutions can also provide back-up disaster recovery protection to centres which prefer on-site CPE or a hybrid model, as reserve protection.

Cultural considerations:

Making the move to cloud is a far bigger proposition than deciding whether to implement or replace a particular contact centre application such as call recording or workforce management. The decision can be as much cultural and political within an organisation as it is technological or operational. As the report will show, the perceived security and data privacy issues around cloud are always present in any such discussion, and a lack of confidence or understanding of the reality around these issues, especially in the higher echelons of decision-makers, can veto the move to cloud, regardless of the financial or functional arguments put in its favour.

The move to cloud has similarities to the decision-making process around IP that many contact centres have been through in the past few years:

• it may not be related just to the contact centre, but other business areas too • the technical elements of the decision may not be easily understood by business-focused executives • concerns about security and reliability are frequently aired • the general movement of control away from the enterprise to a third-party can cause uneasiness • final decisions may not be made from within the contact centre environment.

In the case of IP, 40% of contact centres in the US and UK state that the move to IP was a corporate decision, not a contact centre decision. Although the case for cost reduction via a single IP network was stated to be the most important factor in the final decision, corporate sponsorship (or lack of it) was placed at no.2.

26

INHIBITORS

Despite the generally positive experiences that most users of cloud & hosted solutions report, there are still considerable barriers to implementation that are holding back some potential users, mostly around security, availability and functionality.

The strongest of these is the concern that data security will be compromised by allowing a third-party to control customer details. 21% of non-cloud-based respondents state that data security in the cloud is of great concern to them, down on last year's figure of 30%, which shows that greater education and understanding about risks and successful cloud projects (e.g. CRM) is making an effect. Some cloud-based solutions allow clients to keep call recordings and sensitive customer information on their own site, whereas most others provide externally-audited and accredited dedicated security that can surpass on-premise offerings.

The difficulty in integrating with existing systems, and to a lesser extent, loss of control is also of concern, although most respondents rightly do not consider a lack of reporting to be a deal-breaker. 47% had some concerns that existing investments would be wasted if they were to move to cloud, although many solution providers offer a solution that can work alongside existing CPE elements, such as a PBX.

Solution providers should continue to focus their efforts on demonstrating the strength of their security measures, and reassuring potential users of cloud and hosted solutions that the security measures in place are actually stronger than would be feasible within a fully premise-based operation. Concerns about the practicality of integrating with existing systems should also be addressed.

Figure 3: What concerns do you have about cloud or hosted solutions1?

1 Data from "The UK Contact Centre Decision-Makers Guide 2012" (ContactBabel)

http://www.contactbabel.com/reports.cfm

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28

Security

The greatest concern around cloud-based solutions - particularly in multi-tenancy, public cloud environments - is around security, both from attacks from outside or within the service providers' organisations, or through poorly-designed security allowing data leaks without a sinister motive being present. Allowing a third-party to be in control of a businesses' data security is a major cultural and technological change to the way most businesses and IT departments operate.

Organisations should expect that data should be at least as secure in a third-party environment that is dedicated solely to providing a high-quality cloud-based service, as this is one of the factors by which the solution provider will succeed or fail. Potential cloud clients should look for:

• multiple levels of firewall protection • continuous intruder detection systems • a two-person rule for changes to code or hardware • frequent scheduled password changes • external testing and audit trails • data encryption used both in storage and in transit, under the control of the user • additional layers of user authentication and privilege • vetting of employees with access to sensitive information or hardware • internal traffic and server monitoring.

Businesses should make sure to ask their cloud provider what data encryption levels are operated, and whether the customer is given control of the data encryption key. Data should be encrypted at all stages, when travelling over the network between business and the database, and also when it is in the database and any back-up databases too. US organisations may wish to check that providers are FIPS 140-2 certified, and compliant with PCI-DSS, Sarbanes-Oxley, IFRS, HIPAA and any other regulatory requirements.

Some elements to consider asking about include:

• Security: the cloud provider must have a strong security management system based on an internationally-accepted security framework

• Usage: make sure customer data is used only as instructed or to fulfil the cloud service provider’s legal requirements and that governance and role-based access management policies, and ongoing process testing procedures are in place

• Data ownership: make sure the cloud provider claims no ownership rights to customer data • Payment functionality: some providers (PCI DSS Level 1 compliant) can process payments themselves

in the cloud via IVR, whereas others work with call recording companies to pause recording when relevant

• Disclosure: the cloud provider must only disclose customer data where required by law • Geographical data location: the cloud provider must specify the locations and countries in which data

will be stored. Physical protection of the data centre(s) should also be considered • Auditing: the cloud provider must use third-party auditors to ensure compliance, both physical and

technological.

Readers may also like to be aware of the policies and aims of the Cloud Security Alliance (https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/).

https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/

29

End-user question: "How do we know customer data can’t be shown to other clients or hacked into? Is browser-based technology really secure? What sort of guarantees / certification should we look for?" (Medium-sized financial services organisation)

Access to our service is given in two different ways – via https or via VPN. Both methods provide industry standard encryption, commonly used by banks and ebusiness companies. The https solution is also using certificates to verify the user.

Once connected to the platform the user has to log in with a personal username and password. The profile of the user controls his/her user rights, with a sophisticated access control matrix. The system also has fully automated alarms, immediately attracting the attention of support engineers, to any identified attempts to breach security. To ensure that no client’s data can be accessed by other clients, all data has a unique key for the client that it belongs to, which prohibits other clients from gaining access.

Security concerns are usually related to the best practices and processes of the service provider. The cloud service needs to offer encryption, authentication, audit/logging, physical security, validation and business continuity. Many organisations outsource

their centres to different countries around the world, which also raises data security concerns. Organisations must choose global cloud providers with a secure international service delivery platform. These experts know how to meet the availability, scalability and security requirements of multichannel contact centres.

Often, the vendor's infrastructure is at least as secure as the vendor's clients' environments, since the vendor must meet the security criteria of many companies. In some cases, vendors will submit to audits by their clients' IT or IS teams. While the security needs for industries may vary, some considerations are common to all industries:

1. Is data in transit encrypted using strong encryption, including web authentication, APIs, application data,

call and screen recordings, etc.? 2. Are user accounts secured with encrypted passwords, and does the system support rules for password

complexity, expiration, history, and similar features? 3. Are there features to avoid logging and storing sensitive data, such as payment card info? For sensitive

data that is logged, are features available to encrypt the data? 4. Does the vendor have secure data centre facilities? Note: SAS 70 Type II is an excellent certification to use

as validation for this. 5. Does the vendor have a mature security organization and processes?

A Cloud deployment is often wrongly associated with an increased security risk because transit is often assumed to be by public Internet, the equipment isn’t

located on-site or because sometimes Service Providers deploy to multiple customers from shared equipment. The simple method of obtaining network security is to install a private circuit such as an MPLS Network. Another option for securing Internet connections is by using IPSec VPN tunnels - this is a standard accepted method of securing traffic. Moving equipment offsite is actually an opportunity to significantly improve security by hosting in an enterprise grade Data Centre. Security around these facilities is superior to most office locations.





30


Begin dialogue between your IT/security team and the service being evaluated. Discuss things such as data separation methods, where data resides, access control/physical security, network security, security monitoring, code of conduct, privacy policies and, ultimately, what level of protection is guaranteed under contract. Certain cloud contact

centre providers run single-customer, multi-instance virtualised environments in their datacentres. As well, some offer the option to keep voice traffic and sensitive customer data (including recordings) locally, within your own private network. These two architectural approaches – virtualisation and the hybrid, local control model – are freeing mission critical centres to move to the cloud by providing an added level of security and isolation.

Modern data-use is distributed in nature and, as such, the controls that protect this data must also be distributed. Too often security controls focus on location alone to

protect the perimeter of the building. However, as telecommuting is becoming more conventional and workers may access data from laptops outside of normal business hours, considerable data access exists outside the office walls. Modern data protection controls must be data-centric rather than location-centric. They must follow the data out of the buildings to protect it no matter where it resides. LiveOps agents operate from distributed locations, as such we have created defense-in-depth data-centric controls to follow, and protect the data, and not just the conventional walls of the building. These include such controls as our distributed audit and fraud programs, Secure Exchange to control what data agents can hear or view, PC Protection to manage the agent’s desktop, and Screen Recording, which provides full visibility into the agent’s conversations and desktop. This enterprise security model focuses on building value-add distributed controls that provide actual security, as opposed to the perceived value of often legacy controls surrounding an agent’s desk.

Companies should look for suppliers who have achieved accreditations such as PCI DSS Level 1 and if integration occurs between the Contact Centre

technology and the CRM platform then both these suppliers should have set a security standard together and regular audit testing is completed. It is likely that the only real customer data a cloud based Contact Centre will store will be the voice recordings. It is advisable to use a payment solution that both stops recording and removes the advisor from hearing the payment details. All other data stored within the Contact Centre platform is usually only configuration based data that is the logic to determine what treatment to give callers and where to route the call, so really does hold a minimum risk. Therefore it is still necessary to only select Cloud based Contact Centres that can show a very comprehensive security layer between the internet and application, database and storage servers. Firewalls, Session Border Controllers and the ability to restrict access by users to only the areas of the system they should have access to are just a few basic requirements. The most common forms of security gap are caused by human error, therefore strict enforcement of the IT policy to regularly change passwords, enforce use of special characters in passwords, deactivate unused accounts and run regular security audits are all best-practice type processes which can be run on cloud based services in the same way as on premise platforms.


http://www.inin.com


31


When discussing hosted contact centre solutions with prospective clients, they imagine that they will have access to each others’ systems, but in reality, this is

never the case. With the Noble CaaS solution, VMware software is utilised to ensure that separate instances of software are used for each customer, meaning there is no security risk as it would be impossible for one customer to view another customer’s data. Each client system has its own IP address for additional security which is provided through our firewalls. It is also important to make sure that your hosted supplier has databases located in individual virtual server hosts specific to one tenant. The databases must be in individual VM hosts for that tenant so that the front end DSNs can be set up to talk to that specific database to collect and render data. It is also important for security reasons that the host is related to only one tenant. Noble® Encryption at Rest (NEAR) offers a comprehensive range of encryption solutions designed to meet your data protection requirements. NEAR gives you the security of file systems data encryption without significantly impacting the system performance.

Tight security is essential and, when selecting a Cloud vendor, it’s important that organisations check out the physical protection and security policies of potential; partners. Questions that need to be asked include:

• Are Cloud platform resources distributed across multiple Telcos/ISPs and multiple locations? • Do Cloud vendor systems reside outside your own technical infrastructure? Will they require direct

integration or physical on-site installation? • What firewall, intrusion prevention, antivirus, anti-spyware, Web application firewall, VoIP security,

IM/P2P blocking and Web filtering protection is provided? • What storage and backup is provided to ensure data cannot be lost through either software or physical

failure? • What security audits of capabilities, including intrusion detection tests, are regularly provided by third

party network security specialists? • Are servers fully mirrored to provide business continuity even in the event of a disaster striking (and

without the need for you to make additional contingency investments)? • What access security is provided? Is access only available to authorised staff through, for example, card-

controlled, CCTV-monitored entry systems? Are network entitlements controlled by unique IDs and regularly audited ‘strong’ password policies with automated failure lockout?



33

Integration

Being able to continue using relevant existing CPE systems, and access databases and back-office systems is a minimum requirement for all businesses considering cloud-based solutions, and one which is of great concern to 1 in 6 contact centres, with a further 31% having some concerns. As all businesses are unique, there is no generic solution to this, but many cloud providers have pre-built integration with leading CRM applications such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP and Oracle CRM, and web service APIs enable customers and technology partners to create tightly-integrated contact centre applications.

Potential cloud-users with multiple, complex systems should not underestimate the effort and potential cost associated with integrating these CPE systems with those in the cloud, and this should be factored into any TCO/ROI calculations.

34

End-user question: "We have concerns that integrating with our CRM, back-office systems and bespoke applications may be very difficult." (Medium-sized insurance company)

Our experience is that integration isn’t very difficult. Our platform is flexible and we have numerous ways of integrating – by transferring data periodically in data batches, by performing real-time communication on the server side, or by actioning real-time

requests from the workstation. Of course there is a dependency on the CRM system (or another existing system) to allow for integration in one way or another.

Much of the integration required in legacy call centres is unnecessary with Cloud based contact centres. Integration is easy being software based and Enghouse Interactive has powerful API connectors to leading 3rd party CRM systems/ applications capable of multiple integrations and multiple screen-pops.

Often, integration with cloud-based solutions is easier than with on-premise technology, since cloud solutions typically offer robust and easy to use APIs based on contemporary technology such as web services and REST.

Assuming you are dealing with a market leading contact centre provider, that should not be an issue. Integration with CRM and backend systems is considered standard for cloud contact centre deployments. However, do your due diligence during the evaluation process to ensure there won’t be any surprises.

The success of a call centre project often hinges upon successful integration with agent desktop applications, back-office applications, and enterprise data sources. LiveOps has

developed a rich infrastructure supporting integration during all phases of a call, from initial caller segmentation through call delivery and presentation at the desktop. Further, LiveOps has the technology and experience to support integration with the breadth of modern and legacy enterprise technologies found in many large call centres. The platform's integration infrastructure is designed for extensibility beyond any single integration. Many of our customers require routing based on data extracted directly from an enterprise data source, or interaction with a custom web service or Java API. LiveOps has built an integration infrastructure that allows rapid integration with any web service, data source, or native API required by a given call centre implementation.


http://www.inin.com




35

End-user question: "We have concerns that integrating with our CRM, back-office systems and bespoke applications may be very difficult." (Medium-sized insurance company)

It is true that integration between a cloud platform and back end (on premise) systems can be challenging, therefore it is important to deploy a strategy that keeps data in the most suitable locations and can be linked through the use of

unique identifiers. For example. An incoming caller can be identified through use of CLI or capturing an account code, and can be given dynamic routing treatment or self service functions through a web service layer (between the back end system and the cloud based contact centre). Of course this does usually require some software development unless you go for a strategy to move your CRM data into a platform that has native integration into the Contact Centre. The key thing is to try to avoid any complex CTI integration based on client/server proprietary protocols and use web based interfaces to transfer the CTI data between Contact Centre components to CRM components.

There are a number of ways that we can share data with other systems, such as an agent API that can be used to integrate with your systems, and web services that will work with the IVR. We also have the ability to move data back and

forth by sending data to the secure FTP and uploading and exporting as necessary. Our experience of premise based integration to CRM and back office systems is equally applicable in a cloud based environment.

Through open, standards-based architectures and APIs, Cloud platforms can integrate simply and effectively to a broad range of popular CRM, speech analytics and back office platforms. Ultra is yet to find a package that we are unable to integrate with and has

several clients who have undertaken deep integration. One client, for example, has embedded our call control component in its CRM system; while another uploads its customer contact records to our cloud to create a more integrated service with unified reporting.




From Bricks and Mortar to a Virtual Home in the Cloud Making the Right Choices in a Rapidly Changing World

Email: [email protected]| Tel: +44 (0)2033 573040 | www.enghouseinteractive.com

Thought Leadership by Enghouse Interactive Over the past few years, the relationship between corporate business and consumer has radically changed. Across the western world, we are seeing power shifting back to the customer. Most markets are mature and this speed of commoditisation has made it all the more important to handle customers in the way they want to be handled at a time that’s right for them. Making this focus on customer service still more important; customers are becoming more ‘savvy’ and they have at their disposal – through the Internet, through content aggregators, comparison and peer-to-peer sites - a raft of ways to share information on corporates that simply did not exist a few years ago. For all these reasons, it is more important than ever that businesses get customer service right. Today, most companies have straight-through processes and business systems that allow them to operate economically with an acceptable level of customer service. If you just go back five years or so, the approach most customers took if they had a query or an issue that they want resolved, was to phone the physical contact centre between the hours of 9 to 5 from a fixed landline and speak to a customer service representative. Today, this is just one of a rapidly growing number of options that an individual customer has to establish contact with the company. These factors are driving a change in the role of the contact centre. Organisations need to start putting the right tools in place to allow their customers to choose how, when and where to interact with the company. They are also starting to stream and triage customer interactions, based not just on the nature of the query but on information intelligently gleaned about the customer’s value to the business. In tandem, we are seeing a change in the nature of the contact centre workforce away from the low-value, low-impact call centre operative, unable to offer much added value beyond the ability to route the caller to someone who can actually help. Replacing these individuals are new knowledge-based workers, experts on particular topics who can be brought in to provide help and advice as part of the virtual contact centre.

The ultimate aim is to create an effortless interaction, making it as easy as possible for the customer to get what they need. At the same time enabling companies to streamline their customer service operations and make significant savings as a result. This development is happening in unison with the move away from the traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ contact centre to a more virtual and in many cases cloud-based approach. The keynote today is proliferation of choice, we are certainly not talking about a one-size fits all approach here.

Prospective providers can have the whole solution on premise – within their own firewall. They can run their own private cloud or they can outsource to a BPO who runs a community cloud. Alternatively, they can pay a subscription on a multi-tenant public cloud. Yet, in making their decision, organisations have to take into account a range of issues including: security; scalability; flexibility; geographic needs; regulatory compliance; cost; customer service: availability and reliability. The key trend that underpins most of this is the on-going move from physical to virtual contact centres, which in turn makes it possible for operatives from all other the world to help solve problems for people in any other part of the world as a part of a new ‘skill and need’ contact centre model. As we move into the future, the use of remote workers will become increasingly popular. Organisations will have far greater flexibility to bring staff on stream to help service the virtual contact centre at busy times and then effectively ‘switch them off again’ during quieter periods. We can also expect to see more seamless transitions between the core company and external business process outsourcers. So, for example, a bank with multiple product lines would typically want its own staff to deal with high-value heavily FSA-regulated products like mortgages and man its own contact centre or interaction platform. For lower value products, though, it might well make sense to push the engagement out to a third-party company that is allowed to use the bank’s technology, systems, platform, infrastructure and business processes. Again, this ability to multi-tenant and ‘carve out’ the infrastructure to allow different organisations to share it at the same time is one of the great strengths of the cloud-based virtual approach to contact centres. And, as we look to the future, it is yet another compelling reason why the traditional image of the office-based contact centre with operators wearing headphones packed together like battery hens will increasingly be thought of as an outdated concept.

“With a cloud solution we only pay for what we use. It’s not a huge capital expenditure. Another benefit of that was speed of implementation, because there were no

complicated boxes to configure and install.” Ashley Thomas, Consumer Care Manager at

GlaxoSmithKline Nutritional Healthcare.

"With proven technology available on the market to enable firms to be much more flexible about agent

location, there is no reason for so many contact centres to accept the traditional contact centre model."

Senior Global Marketing Manager CRM for BT.

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.enghouseinteractive.com/

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Control, visibility and reporting

Loss of control is of as much concern to businesses as fears over integration. A service provider may not be as responsive as an in-house team, and it may take hours or even days to make changes to the system. It is also the case that the solution provider upgrades or implements new functionality as and when they wish, in the case of the multi-tenancy model, and backing up the system is also something that the solution provider becomes responsible for. It is vital that such issues form part of any agreement between the client and the cloud solution provider, with expectations of the provider's speed to react stated and agreed in writing before any contract is signed. Some cloud vendors provide complete visibility of their service availability and performance through web-based dashboards.

Reliability and performance

Cloud clients depend upon the solution provider to maintain a high level of service reliability, availability and uptime. This means there must be data centre redundancy and geographical separation, and enforceable service level agreements.

Service providers will test their systems on an ongoing basis, and a few will even guarantee their availability to 99.999% (the '5 9s target of carrier-grade availability), backed by penalties if they do not achieve this. This level of reliability is the standard for very large contact centres which have paid significantly for this in a CPE environment, but is likely to be an improvement on what SMEs are used to, with their much smaller budgets. The nature of cloud-based systems - that they can be accessed from anywhere by anyone with a browser - means that problems at the client's premises can be circumvented by physically moving staff elsewhere. Potential users of cloud-based solutions should be aware of what they are comparing when they place vendors side-by-side for reliability assessment. Some vendors include the necessary downtime associated with maintenance and upgrades of an instance, others only count unscheduled downtime.

Potential clients should make sure that the provider's infrastructure is load-balanced and over-provisioned relative to the number of users to ensure resilience and consistent levels of performance. There is a risk that some providers add new clients without adding new hardware or other supporting systems (which would obviously be more profitable), and this would negatively affect the response times of the applications.

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End-user question: "Do you require any software to be downloaded onto the agent desktop? If not, how do you guarantee the speed of a browser-based solution, especially in a scripted conversation which requires immediate processing?" (Outbound telemarketing company)

We either require Altitude uAgent Windows to be installed on the agent desktop, or can offer Citrix/RDP desktops which minimise desktop management. The installation files are easy to download from our web portal or via a dedicated FTP server. Voice can be

delivered via embedded softphone or a physical IP phone.

There are a number of different flavours of the software from web-based interface to thick clients on the desktop. The quality or connection to the agent desktop is required to ensure fast and immediate reaction of input and response when using agent scripting

tools. As we already deliver our voice path over IP, we do normally not have any issues in this area.

Agent desktop requirements vary by solution. With Five9, the standard agent application is based on Java technology, and is downloaded and installed securely via the web. The Five9 application also provides several features that provide immediate information to agents when

a call arrives, such as a call preview window that includes essential information about the contact and the phone call.

The Interaction Scripter Client requires a download.

We do NOT require any native software to be downloaded to the agent desktop to use our solution. By leveraging a modular, multi-tenant architecture and Web- based

delivery model, the LiveOps on-demand solutions enable organizations to rapidly deploy, configure, and maintain business applications — and empower business users to take control of their software assets.

Some cloud based contact centre platforms will require a download, but others will just use a standard internet browser, therefore speed is not an issue. Scripting tools can still be browser based and not require any download. Speed

issues can occur as a result of poor internet links, if deploying cloud solutions it is good practice to ensure the supplier can run some quality of service testing with you to ensure the contact centre network traffic is routed for optimum performance.

The Noble Systems Cloud Agent uses a browser to run the contact centre desktop, no ‘footprint’ is required on the desktop. We recommend that clients

run with a MPLS solution so that the data and voice have a direct path back to the solution for high speed processing.

To use Ultra Cloud services, advisors must either download the Ultra Callbar, use a third party call control app, or run a bespoke call control app on their desktop. Either way, yes, software does need to be loaded and run on the advisor desktop.




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Functionality

It has been the case in the past that not all cloud-based applications have as much functionality as high-level CPE equivalents. This differs greatly from provider to provider, and of course businesses need to decide which pieces of functionality are vital, and which are worth foregoing to gain the benefits of cloud-based solutions. Customisation in multi-tenancy environments is obviously far more limited than with a CPE delivery model and the cloud provider may not be able or willing to support unique customisation requests.

Having said that, the vast majority of functionality that contact centres require will be available through a cloud-based model, and the prevailing opinion is that with the level of competition in this area, cloud providers will be more likely to update and innovate to keep ahead of the game. The vendors' responses to this question can be seen earlier in this report, or in the Appendix.

Potential clients should look closely at the vendor's financial position and backing to make sure that the quality of service and level of innovation can be maintained in the future, also that they have the technological expertise in-house to keep making these improvements.

Cost

It may seem strange to put 'cost' as a potential inhibitor, but hosting for long time (more than 3 years for example) may end up costing more than purchasing the technology outright. The truth of this will be determined in the TCO/ROI study that will be undertaken before any decision is made about cloud, and will need to include related elements such as the cost of system and application updates, as well as the greater benefit and lower cost associated with more frequent upgrades and recent functionality. The cost of terminating a contract should also be considered as a potential risk element in the cost equation, if the move to cloud does not work out.

There are a lot of good reasons to consider the cloud. Increased flexibility. Faster deployment time. Minimal upfront

capital expenses. Reduced IT requirements. But selection of the best contact centre cloud-vendor is the make or

break decision. The Communications as a Service offering from Interactive Intelligence is used by some of the most

well-respected companies around the world. Our cloud solution provides you the high levels of security you require,

with the level of control you determine, and the ability to move to on-premise if your business needs ever change.

Moreover, you have access to the broadest set of applications available, with the ability to move as rapidly as you’d

like. Good reasons to trust the Interactive Intelligence cloud.

www.inin.com

CONTACT CENTRE • UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS • BUSINESS PROCESS AUTOMATION

C l o u d - b a s e d o r O n - p r e m i s e

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CLOUD-BASED CONTACT CENTRE SOLUTIONS: TERMINOLOGY

The modern contact centre has a multitude of applications supporting it, with hardware, middleware and networking equipment around and inside it. The traditional method of deploying these resources has been on a CPE basis, with the business's IT resource implementing and maintaining it. Now, the vast majority of this equipment, functionality and supporting resource is available in a third-party hosted environment, one of the various types of cloud-based delivery.

Broadly, there are five types of technology that contact centres have, although not all subscribe to all of the functionality within them of course:

• Contact centre functionality: ACD/PBX-type functionality (including call routing and queuing), CTI, IVR (routing and self-service), outbound dialling

• Desktop applications: CRM, customer management systems, helpdesk applications, agent desktop, knowledge bases, multimedia response applications, scripting, web chat & collaboration

• Management applications: workforce management, QA/QC, call recording, speech analytics, reporting, MIS and business intelligence, eLearning, workforce optimisation

• Enabling technology: security, databases, middleware, IP networks and other common architecture or hardware

• Other hardware: IP phones, PCs or desktop terminals, headsets etc. Cloud-based solutions are the latest in a line of alternatives for businesses to owning and running their own technology. Here are explanations of some of the terms that readers may have encountered in researching cloud-based contact centres. • Cloud is the delivery of computing and storage capacity as a service to different business, organisations

and individuals over a network. It is often said to consist of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - servers and storage space, Platform as a Service (PaaS) - operating systems and web servers, and Software as a Service (SaaS) - the functionality of software available on demand without the need to own or maintain it. The Cloud is characterised by huge scalability and flexibility, shared resources, a utilities approach to billing (pay for what you use, for example) and an abstraction of obvious infrastructure.

There are various deployment models:

o Public cloud: applications, storage, and other resources are made available by a service provider, often offered on a pay-per-use model. Public cloud service providers own and operate the infrastructure and offer access via the Internet.

o Private cloud: infrastructure operated solely for a single organisation, whether managed internally or by a third-party and hosted internally or externally. They require management by the organisation or its third-party

o Virtual private cloud: a deployment model that pulls in public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) while running the application on-premise or in a private cloud, in order to improve disaster

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recovery, flexibility and scalability and to benefit from Opex-based costing while avoiding expensive hardware purchases

o Community cloud shares infrastructure between several organisations from a specific community with common concerns (security, compliance, jurisdiction, etc.), whether managed internally or by a third-party and hosted internally or externally. The costs are spread over fewer users than a public cloud (but more than a private cloud), so do not gain as much from cost reductions.

o Hybrid cloud is a composition of two or more clouds (private, community or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together, offering the benefits of multiple deployment models. By utilizing "hybrid cloud" architecture, companies and individuals are able to obtain degrees of fault tolerance combined with locally immediate usability without dependency on internet connectivity. Hybrid Cloud architecture requires both on-premises resources and off-site (remote) server based cloud infrastructure.

• SaaS (Software as a Service) is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an

application to customers for use as a service on demand. SaaS software vendors may host the application on their own web servers or download the application to the consumer device, disabling it after use or after the on-demand contract expires. The on-demand function may be handled internally to share licenses within a firm or by a third-party application service provider (ASP) sharing licenses between firms.

On-demand licensing and use alleviates the customer's burden of equipping a device with every conceivable application. It also reduces traditional End User License Agreement (EULA) software maintenance, ongoing operation patches, and patch support complexity in an organisation. On-demand licensing enables software to become a variable expense, rather than a fixed cost at the time of purchase. It also enables licensing only the amount of software needed versus traditional licences per device. SaaS also enables the buyer to share licences across their organisation and between organisations, to reduce the cost of acquiring EULAs for every device in their firm.

Using SaaS can also conceivably reduce the upfront expense of software purchases, through less costly, on-demand pricing from hosting service providers. SaaS lets software vendors control and limit use, prohibits copies and distribution, and facilitates the control of all derivative versions of their software. The sharing of end-user licenses and on-demand use may also reduce investment in server hardware.

• Hosted solutions have similarities to SaaS in that the application is hosted off the customer's premises, but may not actually be managed by the ASP. A hosted solution may be an individual instance of an application running on a single server dedicated to the customer, restricted in scalability by its finite nature. Although this may allow greater control and flexibility, it can be more expensive and there is less redundancy. It may be thought that all SaaS solutions are hosted, but not all hosted applications are SaaS.

• Network-based solutions are marketed as solutions with equipment physically located in multiple

locations, permitting users to access the various services via a combination of the contact centre’s internet connection and the standard PSTN networks. This allows complete geographic independence and disaster recovery (DR) solutions.

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• Multi-tenancy is key to an understanding of cloud-based solutions. It refers to where a single instance of the software runs on a server, serving many customer organisations (tenants). Client's data and configuration are separated virtually but the same actual hardware, software versions and databases are used.

• Multi-instance occurs where separate software instances or versions (and possibly actual physical hardware) are provided for each individual business.

• Hardware virtualisation masks from users the physical characteristics of the platform, hosting multiple isolated instances of an application on one or more servers. The same image can be used on multiple sites, whether customer-owned or hosted.

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End-user question: "We've heard of community clouds, where the cost and resources are shared between several companies. How is this organised? Do we have to find our partners ourselves?" (Public sector)

We can offer both cloud based services (where a number of clients share the same platform) or private hosted services, where we host and manage infrastructure dedicated to a specific client. We offer our cloud solution as a complete platform –

including software, hardware, management, support and telephony – ready to ”plug-and-play.”

Enghouse Interactive recognises that this is the best solution for multiple companies or mergers. We have the capability and partners available to deliver this today.

One of the inherent benefits of the cloud model is the ability to share resources across multiple companies. Cloud Services Brokerage is an interesting emerging trend where third parties (or internal IT organisations for large entities) help simplify deployment and management of multiple cloud services on behalf of multiple companies. If you’re

interested in learning more, check out this blog post on the topic.

We have not implemented any community clouds at this point but the option is available. The details of how this would be organized would need to be discussed with

our Operations Department and yes, you would have to find partners yourselves.

True cloud providers will be sharing the same technology infrastructure across multiple customers and therefore the ability exists to reduce costs to serve as a core benefit.

Noble Systems defines a community cloud infrastructure as provisioned for exclusive use by a specific community of consumers from organisations that

have shared concerns (e.g. mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations). Currently, we are not focused on a community cloud, but if a community of organised partners came together looking for a shared environment, we would certainly look at the business requirements and create a solution that could work for both organisations.

http://www.inin.com/Blog/archive/2012/08/10/cloud-services-brokerage-the-new-it.aspx


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Get the simplicity, scalability, speed andflexibility you need in your multichannelcontact centre today.» Seamless CRM Integration» Trusted security» Award winning» Cloud based

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IMPLEMENTATION AND USE

DECIDING ON CLOUD

Not all businesses are ready for cloud-based solutions. Perhaps culturally there are too many concerns about security within various areas of the business to carry the argument. It may be that there has just been a major capital investment in CPE which fulfils the contact centre's need. Moving to cloud is not a 'no-brainer'. Below are some of the characteristics that mean some businesses will choose CPE while others will migrate to cloud-based solutions.

Figure 4: Characteristics of businesses choosing cloud and CPE

More suitable for Cloud

More suitable for CPE

Fluctuating call traffic (e.g. seasonality) that requires flexibility in adding & shedding agents

More predictable traffic that does not require changes in agent numbers

Planned addition of new sites and/or homeworkers

Stable contact centre environment in terms of headcount and location

Looking to add functionality and/or have technology at end-of-life

Have made substantial and recent investments in technology

Multi-site locations that could benefit from consistency of technology and management Single-site location or no need to virtualise

Innovative and risk-taking culture aimed at gaining competitive edge

Conservative cultural approach to new technology and risk management

Simpler reporting & routing Very complex routing & reporting requirements

More standardised back-office integration Sophisticated and deep integration with back-office systems, developed over many years

Willing to look at Opex model of funding More comfortable with Capex model

Do not have enough experienced IT staff to implement, support and maintain desired systems

Have a lot of experienced IT staff

Willing to cede some control over privacy and security to third-parties

Culturally unwilling to relinquish control over privacy and security

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Many solution providers emphasise that cloud/premise decision is just as much about attitudes and commitment to internal IT as it is about cost. Few see the IT department as one of the initial instigators of the decision to move to cloud, as this carries a perceived threat about its role and even ongoing existence. For many organisations however, the IT department is freed from its role of ongoing maintenance and management, and can look at other projects of more strategic benefit to the business. Some solution providers do often report a lack of enthusiasm within the IT department, who are used to premise-based solutions and may feel threatened by such a radical change, although vendors report that it is rare for jobs to be threatened as a result.

Most of the momentum to move to cloud comes from senior people within contact centre operations (e.g. Contact Centre Director) who want specific functionality but don't care how they get it, or senior management such as those at CFO, CTO or CIO level.

Solution providers report that interest in their cloud-based offerings received a big boost from the economic downturn, where Capex generally disappeared. This is said to be much less the case now - it is still important, like any purchase or rental - but is less frequently the main driver in any decision.

Thought Leadership

© 2012 Interactive Intelligence, Inc.

Cloud-based Contact Centre: Does it Make Sense for Your Business? by Donna Fluss, Founder & President, DMG Consulting and Joe Staples, CMO, Interactive Intelligence

The cloud gives contact centres and businesses a viable option for communications. Yet, in deciding between the cloud and a premise-based solution, some businesses are still unsure which option is best for them. Two communications industry authorities discuss questions being asked by contact centre decision makers. Q: As companies consider moving business communications to the cloud, what are the primary benefits they can expect?

Staples/Interactive Intelligence: Based on what we’ve seen from our customers, the benefits have really been focused in four areas. The first, and most prevalent, is the increased flexibility the cloud provides. This includes things like adding and contracting user counts, easier access to new functionality, new trial applications, and the ease of adding users. We also hear how the cloud can allow for faster deployment. Since the entire back-end infrastructure at the data centre is already in place, the planning phase is reduced and customers can be up and running in shorter time — often a few weeks. A third benefit, which fuels growth in the cloud-based contact centre space, is the ability to deploy technology with minimal upfront expense. Finally, the benefit of reduced IT requirements means in-house staff can delegate much of the day-to-day management and administration to the service provider. Q: Is it more difficult to integrate a cloud-based contact centre infrastructure solution than premise-based?

Fluss/DMG Consulting: The issue is not where the solution is located. It’s about integration framework and capabilities. When applications are built using standards-based and open technology, such as Web Services, it is easier to integrate them with other third-party or home-grown applications. Many premise-based contact centre solutions have been retrofitted to include a Web Services integration layer, while a number of newer cloud-based solutions are built using services oriented architecture (SOA). Solutions that use SOA have been built from the ground up to facilitate integration. While standards-based resources are required for any integration, the learning curve and cost are typically lower. Hosted/cloud-based solution vendors are motivated to get offerings up and running as quickly as possible, because they do not earn revenue until the system is in production. Additionally, end users know selecting a cloud-based offering means they don’t have to pay for an expensive and lengthy implementation. Most cloud-based contact centre infrastructure vendors hire experienced integration and implementation resources and do a good job of keeping costs down. Many cloud-based vendors offer fixed implementation and integration fees that compare favourably with similar premise-based efforts. They appreciate that revenue comes from monthly fees, not start-up charges. Q: When does it make sense to consider a cloud-based contact centre, and when is it better to acquire a premise-based solution?

Fluss/DMG Consulting: It depends on specifics. Prospects should perform total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) analyses to assess unique needs. Many CFOs prefer to invest in cloud-based solutions rather than purchasing licenses for systems and applications to gain flexibility. Cloud-based solutions require no capital investment, almost no implementation and integration fees, payments that scale with business activity, no support costs, limited risk and obligations, and no need to pay for upgrades. Staples/Interactive Intelligence: We recommend that all customers consider both premise and cloud options in the evaluation and planning phase.

Download the complete whitepaper to learn more: Cloud-based Contact Centre: Does it Make Sense for Your Business?

Visit | www.inin.com/whitepapers

http://www.inin.com/whitepapers

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End-user question: "What happens to our IT department? Have you found that it is cut?" (Public sector)

The need for internal IT resource to manage the contact centre platform is much lower, or even eliminated, once the business has migrated to the cloud platform. This may mean that the IT department is cut, or it may mean that the internal IT department is

re-focused to work with other more productive tasks.

IT resource is redeployed, not removed – it reduces the resource needed to manage within public cloud environments. However a number of our customers' IT personnel have welcome this – it has enabled them to be used elsewhere to help develop new

strategies or concentrate on key areas of improvements across the business.

IT resources are rarely reduced as a result of deploying cloud-based technology. Rather, it enables an IT department to focus on more value-added services for business users – integration with internal systems, enhanced reporting capabilities, other projects, etc.

That is a great question. While it is certainly an option, most companies we speak to don’t end up reducing headcount when moving to the cloud, but rather re-focus resources to address more strategic imperatives or initiatives that have not been able to be addressed due to a lack of resources.

In many cases an existing IT department is retooled to support a variety of new functions supporting the cloud instance. In most cases IT departments are not cut, just

repurposed but the many of them do shrink in size due to taking on a less expansive role in maintenance, etc.

When deploying hosted, whether to cut the IT department is dependent on the goals of the organisation. Various clients have put different strategies in place

and some have even changed their original plans. Most clients have understaffed IT departments due to increased workload and implementing a hosted solution has freed them up to work on other projects. Some clients have restructured their IT departments to have fewer full-time employees and use consultants for any network/firewall, PBX or PC issues.

Many organisations use Cloud specialists to create new strategies to improve quality and productivity and spot problems rather than employ in-house managers and analysts to carry out these tasks. Other organisations choose to supplement their in-house teams

with Cloud infrastructure, operational and telephony specialists.



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CHOOSING A VENDOR

Security:

There are various accreditations and certifications used by providers of cloud-based solutions, some aimed at demonstrating the security of the data centre (whether physical or virtual security) including SSAE16 and SAS70. Others focus on the process of processing payment card data (PCI DSS), whereas others are around information security controls (ISO 27001). Other interested parties include the Cloud Security Alliance, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing as a whole.

The importance and concern about security has been seen earlier in this report. The solution providers interviewed for this report were confident that the dedicated security procedures and architecture in place within their solutions were likely to exceed those found in their clients' previous contact centre operations, having full-time dedicated security resources and a vested interest in keeping client data safe. A security breach for in-house contact centre is damaging and embarrassing; for a cloud provider to suffer a similar failure would impact very severely on their credibility and the future of the very company. However, as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) states in its Guidelines on Security and Privacy in Public Cloud Computing, security should not be left simply to the solution provider.

Functionality:

Solution providers state that moving from a premise-based deployment to the cloud should not reduce the functionality available to users - at least, as long as complex customisation is not required. Potential cloud users are responsible for carrying out an audit of all existing and required functionality, and how it relates to defined business processes, before asking solution providers to guarantee that any move to cloud will include the required depth of functionality. It is not enough to accept that solution providers have 'workforce management' or 'outbound' capabilities. There is a great deal of upgrading and increased sophistication happening in the cloud world, which in some cases is from quite basic functionality, so potential users should have a list of specific processes and functionality that any solution should be able to deliver, and make sure that the chosen solution can deliver that.

It is also important to understand the opportunities for scalability. Adding and shedding agents when required is one of the big advantages that cloud computing has over its premise-based equivalent, but potential users should put real-life scenarios in front of bidding suppliers to make sure that the required level of scalability is possible and that no hidden costs or nasty surprises are associated with it.

http://www.nist.gov/customcf/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=909494

http://www.nist.gov/customcf/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=909494

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Reliability:

Multi-location data centres are ubiquitous amongst cloud providers, providing redundancy and disaster recovery as part of the deal. Stated levels of availability amongst interviewees range from 99.7% to 99.999%, and most if not all are backed with performance-related guarantees, with reimbursement of fees if targets are not met. While this is somewhat reassuring, it will do little to assuage the loss of revenue or customer goodwill if the cloud-based contact centre solution is unavailable for any amount of time. Potential clients should investigate the exact levels of redundancy built into solutions, including the use of alternative network providers and mirrored data centres if the problem occurs outside the software providers' purview.

Cost:

Most cloud solution providers operate a per-agent/per-month option to pricing, with a minimum number of logged-on agents per month being the baseline minimum cost. To this, the cost per minute of calls made or delivered should be added, although many providers will offer this as part of the package, to make fees more predictable. Additional costs for customisation and integration should also be investigated.

More detail on costing can be found in the 'Pricing and Contracts' section towards the end of the report, and the role of cost in assessing TCO and ROI is found in the next main section.

Integration and customisation:

Cloud vendors will keep APIs up-to-date, with screen-popping into a home-grown CRM system, look-up of call recordings in a CRM systems, and sending reporting and recordings to a third-party application being mentioned as some of the more frequent integrations requested. Some providers have very close relationships with specific CRM vendors, and as a general maxim, cloud-based contact centre solutions can be seen to be following in the footsteps of cloud-based CRM.

Some customisation in existing operations may have come about as an ad-hoc 'work-around' that has over time become the way in which things are done. It is important to revisit the business processes that the technology is there to facilitate, to see if there are easier ways to achieve this rather than reproducing the same method in a cloud-based environment.

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Suggested process for choosing a cloud-based provider:

The selection of most IT solutions is normally carried out in a similar way, but some steps you may wish to consider for cloud-based solutions include:

• A selection team should be chosen with responsibility for all of the areas affected, including contact centre operations, IT, business operations and probably sales and marketing

• While bearing in mind the underlying business processes that the technology supports, select the specific technologies that are to be hosted, and also those bespoke applications that are to remain in-house, such as specific complex reports. Take the opportunity to consider 'ideal world' functionality as well

• Research the types of solution available in the market, and understand the actual differences between premise-based and cloud-based functionality. Provide vendors with specific instances of complex functionality required to meet your own particular requirements and challenge then to prove that they can be met. This should include all instances of existing back-office functionality that the solution needs to integrate with and where possible, a wish-list of functionality in the future

• Investigate publically-available referenceable sites from cloud-based providers that are similar to your own requirements, and submit an RPF (request for proposal) to the long-list. Request a detailed product roadmap along with timescales in order to assess whether this solution will meet your demands along the line. You may wish to invite solution providers informally to demonstrate their product before offering an RFP

• Any response to an RFP should include service level agreements over availability, call delivery, voice quality, speed to make requested changes, details of security and redundancy offered, prices for customisation, contract length options, implementation times and contract cancellation penalties and notice periods.

Cloud-Based Contact Center Software Buyer's Guide

To learn more visit our website www.Five9.com or call us at 1-800-553-8159.

1. Inclusive and Inexpensive. Cloud-based contact center solutions deliver comprehen-sive functionality, on full parity with the most mature premise-based solutions, but delivered through a standard web-browser, eliminating the need to purchase expensive hardware and software. You can focus on your contact center—not your infrastructure—and add functionality for inbound, outbound or blended call processing.

2. Quick Deployment. Whether small business or large enterprise, configuring, customizing, and deploying cloud-based solutions is fast and easy, allowing you to get your call center operational in as little as 48 hours. Plus, simple administrative tools empower you to own and configure your system. Make sure your vendor of choice offers 24/7 service, support, and training to help you get your solution off the ground efficiently.

3. Better Customer Experience. Blended agents that manage both inbound and outbound calling enhance customer loyalty, but deploying the required tools and technology through a premise-based system can be a hassle. Cloud-based solutions have the necessary functionality built-in, so you quickly realize the benefits, including more productivity, greater customer satisfaction, and improved success measurements.

4. Agents Anywhere. Agents can be located anywhere with a cloud-based contact center—and they can access the system immedi-ately. Experiment with different models such as insourc-ing, outsourcing, or at-home agents, and find the mix that works for you.

5. Latest for Less. Because cloud-based contact centers upgrade automati-cally, software innovations that add more capability and

value simply appear in the solution. Cutting edge features, like Speech Recognition and Voice Self-Service, can be added without additional hardware, or lengthy upgrade implementations.

6. Fast, Easy Integration. Agents in cloud-based solutions can quickly take advan-tage of screen pops, click-to-dial, and activity history in a single agent desktop, due to proven, pre-built links to popular CRM and other software solutions. Look for integration for leading solutions, including Salesforce, Microsoft, NetSuite, Siebel, RightNow, and Leads360.

7. Scalable and Flexible. Cloud-based contact centers can scale up or down quickly with just a phone call, allowing businesses to match both resources and costs to needs. Of course, this includes multiple locations worldwide.

8. No Capital Investment. Hardware and software investments are eliminated with a cloud-based solution, freeing up capital—and making ongoing expenses easier to forecast. Plus, easy adminis-tration means less demand for costly IT resources.

9. Pay as You Go. The subscription model allows you to only pay for the agents that are using the system. Seasonal or growth businesses can manage changes with one phone call.

10. Streamlined Processes. A fully integrated cloud-based solution lets you re-think and streamline old processes—some of which may just be covering up premise-based software limitations. Make sure that technology works for you, and that you are not working for your premise-based technology.

Whether you’re just getting started with a contact center, launching a new business initia-tive, or outgrowing an existing product, there are many good reasons to consider a cloud-based solution. This overview will help you make an informed decision about what is best for your business, by identifying the key differences between premise-based and cloud-based systems.

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ESTIMATING ROI AND TCO

Before being able to calculate return on investment, it is necessary to understand the total cost of ownership of cloud-based solutions compared to their CPE equivalents. These can include:

• Reduction or redistribution of agents expanding the agent pool and service levels without increasing

agent numbers • Impact of increased functionality on call handling times and FCR • The in-house cost associated with the maintenance and management of on-premise hardware and

software, compared with that spent monitoring cloud-based systems (although minimal, businesses will still want to be aware of what is happening, when upgrades are scheduled, supplier liaison, etc)

• Initial cost of CPE and the structure of financial payments, effect of depreciation etc. • The value of staying current with technology, both in terms of reduced licence fees and the impact of

superior systems on agent performance. Include the cost of more frequent training requirements in a frequent release environment

• Whether additional functionality provided by the cloud provider over time is included in the fixed monthly payment, and if so, what would be the cost of upgrading on-premise solutions to include this functionality?

• Compare the cost of staffing for seasonal volumes and spikes (licences, recruitment, training, staff salaries etc) compared to cloud-based PAYG and homeworkers or short-shift workers, as well as attendant additional hardware fees for major on-premise volume increases (e.g. adding an extra server).

The distribution of payments is very different, as well as the overall fee paid. Although there may be an initial fee associated with cloud-based solutions (connected with the discovery and implementation phase, as well as a payment in advance), this upfront cost is likely to be far lower than with traditional on-premise purchases, although the latter may be alleviated somewhat in the case of a leasing arrangement.

TCO assessments of cloud vs on-premise deployments generally reach a conclusion that cloud-based cost savings are proportionately larger with increasing contact centre size, and also where the level of functionality is greater too. However, some solution providers report that longer-term, the depreciation associated with on-premise solutions means that the TCO gap narrows, so that after 7 years or more, the difference is much less, if not wiped out totally.

As expected, there is no single right calculation to the ROI question, although payback is expected within 12 months in virtually all cases, and in many, a considerably shorter timescale (perhaps 3-6 months). The actual figure depends on factors such as number of seats, the number of contact centre locations, the functionality employed, the costs of integration or customisation and other such factors. Most vendors have an ROI calculator for prospective clients to use. Any choice not to move to cloud is less frequently financial than for many other types of technology decision (except perhaps in cases where there has been large recent capital investment made), but may be more concerned with cultural issues, existing IT infrastructure and expertise, and other concerns which may or may not be entirely justified.

be unique – be social – be served

www.enghouseinteractive.com

Everyone’s

talking Cloud.

Your customers

are talking,

are you listening?

Talk to Enghouse

In today’s global market place an agile contact centre that can flex with the demands of both customers and the business, plays a pivotal role in creating competitive differentiation. Improved customer experience, flexibility, scalability, ease-of-use and substantially lower cost are all powerful motivators, driving businesses to move into the Cloud.

Enghouse Interactive’s integrated suite of Cloud solutions are helping thousands of organisations of all sizes, industries and complexity across the world to realise the significant business benefits of a Cloud deployment. Our solutions include multi-channel contact centres, self-service, attendant operator consoles and workforce optimisation applications.

From a single site call reception console to a multi-tenanted, multi-media contact centre – Enghouse Interactive has the expertise and extensive partner network to ensure success in the Cloud.

www.enghouseinteractive.com

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IMPLEMENTATION TIMINGS

Once the decision to proceed with a specific vendor's cloud solution has been made, the next step is to implement. While every project is different, and depends upon the size, functionality and complexity of any integration, most solution providers report that cloud-based contact centres can be operational within a matter of days or a few weeks. It may be divided into the following stages (some of which may run concurrently), which will differ greatly in length due to the size and complexity of the organisation and its required functionality:

• Discovery: 2-6 days • Build, training and reporting: 4-8 days • Implementation and testing: 3-6 days • Fine tuning and adoption: 2-4 days • Bespoke agent and management training: 2-6 days • eLearning and after-sales support as appropriate.

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End-user question: "Is it best to wait to move everything to the cloud or should we do it piecemeal?" (Large outsourcer)

This is very much depending on the type of operations that you have. From a cost perspective it only makes a minor difference, but from a practical operational

perspective it has many benefits to migrate in small steps – it allows the users to build confidence in the cloud solution, and to become comfortable with the new system, and it also allows for calibration and customisation to be done during the migration period.

Take the plunge – The immediate results from cloud are vast – its business agile opening up new strategies for multichannel and entering into new markets with actionable information at your fingertips...or...Trial new markets/ channels - A number of our

customers are using customers to trial new projects, product etc., so you are reducing the risk.

Most companies take a pragmatic, incremental approach when moving to the cloud – either by department, for new campaigns, or for new clients (for outsourcers). This approach helps mitigate against disruptive change, and helps establish a template for success that can be

repeated throughout the organization.

That really depends on your existing environment and preferences. Ultimately you will want to get to a single, all-in-one solution in the cloud. However, you may want to wait to replace certain systems or applications until they are fully-depreciated.

The cloud option allows you to the flexibility move at your own pace, either all at once or piecemeal. LiveOps offers an a la carte menu of Contact Centre Applications so you

can select the pieces you want and implement them in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the cost of on-premise systems.

Most customers move to the cloud application by application. It is very important to ensure that there is a long term strategy where the cloud vendors interoperate with each other and with any on-premise applications where

necessary. The great benefit of moving to Cloud Contact Centre is this can be "layered" over an existing on premise PBX thereby providing a no risk migration strategy and giving all the benefits of Cloud while protecting any outstanding investment or asset value.



http://www.inin.com




58

End-user question: "Is it best to wait to move everything to the cloud or should we do it piecemeal?" (Large outsourcer)

Noble has introduced a Hybrid solution to enable our customers to ‘try out’ the hosted offering. Noble Cloud EC is an evolutionary solution that allows you

to instantly access broader bandwidth to expand your contact centre capacity on demand, wherever your agents are located. Using ‘elastic capacity' architecture, the Cloud EC platform provides a hybrid CPE (customer premise equipment) and CaaS environment that supports volume spikes, peak periods, new programs, work-from-home agents, etc.

Because Cloud services can be easily overlaid onto existing infrastructure, they can be deployed at a pace that suits the organisation in question. If a new function such as ACD, voice portal or dialler is required, for example, Cloud solutions can typically be deployed

at short notice and with little disruption to existing infrastructure. Very little integration work is generally required and connection requirements are minimal. In the case of Ultra services, all that is required is a standard Internet browser and a standard PSTN telephone (or softphone).



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RESULTS OF USING CLOUD-BASED SOLUTIONS

A study of UK contact centres which have actually implemented a hosted or managed solution have generally found that it has delivered significant advantages in most cases. The strongest experience was a reduction in cost, with 54% of respondents agreeing that the overall cost of ownership was cheaper. 57% experienced more powerful or extended functionality in a hosted or managed environment, with only 12% disagreeing. 44% found that making changes to the system was now easier, compared with 31% who felt the opposite.

Figure 5: Have cloud-based solutions made any difference2?

2 Data from "The UK Contact Centre Decision-Makers' Guide 2012" (ContactBabel)

11%16% 19%

43%41%

25%

34% 31%

25%

11% 8%

25%

2% 4% 6%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

Cheaper overall cost of ownership

More powerful or extended functionality

Easier to make changes to the system

Have cloud-based solutions made any difference?

Strongly disagree

Disagree

Neutral

Agree

Strongly agree


Contacts: • Altitude Cloud Sweden - Orebro, Sweden - +46 (0) 766-440 206 - [email protected] • Reffekt AB - 556778-0860 - Nikolaigatan 3, Box 172, 701 43 Örebro - [email protected] - Telefon:019-506 11 00

CASE STUDY - Reffekt

“Altitude Cloud was the natural step forward. We no longer need I.T resources - it is highly automated, flexible, cost effective, easy to deploy and offers more mobility. I can honestly say that I haven’t looked back since”. Micael Jönsson, MD, at Reffekt Reffekt, founded in 2009, is a profitable outsourcing contact centre in Orebro, Sweden providing intelligent multi-channel solutions to help companies build stronger customer relationships. With revenue growth of c. 80% in 2011, during a global economic downturn, the 200 seat outsourcer has continued to expand its wings and opened a second contact centre in Uppsala.

Reffekt prides itself in delivering world class client KPI’s, maintaining loyal customers for nearly three times longer than the national average, and having one of the lowest ‘customer regret’ rates within 14 days of purchase. Originally part of K3 Nordic, Reffekt primarily focuses on outbound telemarketing (80% B2C and 20% B2B), offering innovative, niche prospect and customer contact ideas for large global companies across vertical markets. The outsourcer also offers a successful inbound customer service channel, consisting of 20 seats with plans to introduce new sites and expand its business globally in 2012 and beyond.

Successful partnership and superb technical support leads Reffekt to choose Altitude Reffekt was already using Altitude's Unified Dialler solution, and MD Micael Jönsson was extremely impressed with its functionality and confident that the rest of Altitude uCI suite’s components would deliver exactly what Reffekt required, as the company continues to extend its business offering: a hassle free customer interaction management solution with better and simpler architecture for easier integration.

The recent adoption of Altitude Cloud Contact Centre meant that Reffekt enjoys unprecedented levels of functionality from cloud technology, without the need for IT resources, at much reduced cost, with the added flexibility and capability of becoming geographically neutral. Additionally, Micael Jönsson found Altitude’s staff very friendly and helpful, always willing to listen and adapt to suit Reffekt’s needs.

Optimise customer satisfaction levels in a much faster and efficient way As customer satisfaction and successful call outcomes are key focal points at Reffekt, it is crucial that the outsource contact centre is able to record all calls for specific campaigns, and for specific agents, in order to maximise staff performance. Altitude Voice Recorder delivers world-class features with all the benefits of a hosted solution: fast set-up, reduced operating costs, on-demand capacity and no capital outlay. By offering real-time assistance and feedback for agents, Reffekt is able to identify good and bad practices and maximise staff performance accordingly. As a result, agent attrition and staff sickness levels now run at an even lower rate of less than 5%.

Altitude’s cloud solution enables Reffekt to stay ahead of the game and focus on its core business As a customer centric organisation, it is paramount for Reffekt that each customer receives the best level of service. Altitude Cloud Contact Centre’s feature-rich multimedia interaction router provides Reffekt with the intelligence it needs to offer every customer an appropriate level of service from the agent with the best suited skill set and within an optimal time frame. Since Altitude Cloud takes care of all the software technicalities, Reffekt is able to concentrate on its business and focus on delivering exceptional customer service.

Reffekt also required a solution to automate its outbound dialling campaigns, one that would ultimately enable them to deliver the highest level of customer satisfaction and boost productivity. The outsourcer now uses the predictive dialling pacing mode to predict when agents will be available and decide how many calls to make. As a result, the Altitude cloud solution significantly improved the time per hour that agents were actually talking to customers, particularly when conducting outbound CRM campaigns.

Remarkable results lead Reffekt to open second contact centre site Due to the success of its first cloud contact centre, Reffekt decided to open up a second contact centre site, which was up and running within hours. The flexibility and scalability of Altitude Cloud’s Contact Centre solution meant that Reffekt could install only a few seats at first and then increase this number to meet the organisation’s specific needs within a rapid time-scale and with the lowest total cost of ownership.

Client Profile • Profitable outsourcing contact centre in Sweden • 80% Revenue growth in 2011 • 200 seat site • Opened a second site in Uppsala • Customer retention above national average • Lowest ‘customer regret’ rates • Focuses on outbound telemarketing • Innovative, niche prospect and customer contact ideas

Business Benefits • Receive capacity and growth on demand with virtually

unlimited processing and storage capabilities • Only pay for the capacity used without any upfront capital • Effortlessly communicate and collaborate with more agility

and flexibility, anywhere and at any time.

Solution Benefits

• Complete, reliable solutions; • Predictable, reduced costs; • Easy to use; Easy to manage. Solution Profile

Altitude Cloud Contact Centre: • Altitude Voice Recorder • Altitude Unified Agent Desktop • Altitude Predictive Dialler • Altitude Router • Altitude uSupervisor • Altitude vBox



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MARKET LANDSCAPE

Currently, around 38% of UK contact centres report that they use some cloud-based functionality. Respondents to The UK Contact Centre Decision-Makers' Guide 2012 were asked about whether they used specific functionality, and if so, how it was delivered (i.e. through CPE, or cloud/hosted deployments).

IVR and call routing functionality were the most likely to be deployed through cloud-based solutions, with hosted CRM and automated dialler functionality also used in a significant minority of instances. Many of the early examples of cloud-based solutions (including those that were called hosted or managed services) were aimed at the outbound market, providing dialler functionality. As times and customer requirements have changed, inbound and blended functionality has developed.

Figure 6: If you use this functionality, is it delivered through a cloud/hosted solution?

In terms of usage by contact centre sizes, large operations (200+ seats) were more than three times as likely as small and medium contact centres (<50 seats & 51-200 seats) to have cloud-based IVR and automated dialler functionality, and twice as likely to have cloud-based routing capabilities, as we would expect. Small contact centres lead the way in the use of cloud-based CRM systems, with many cost-effective solutions available in this space.

Solution providers often comment that initially, those applications that don't require close monitoring or the highest levels of security can go into the cloud, to test how this deployment model works in a live environment before considering it for more ingrained and mission-critical functionality.

31%

27%

23%21%

16%

11% 11%

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

IVR /speech recognition

Call routing functionality

(ACD)

CRM / customer management

software

Automated outbound

dialling

Workforce management

Other software Multimedia software

Use of cloud-based functionality


62

Many cloud solution providers are focusing upon the 50-250 seat contact centre market - the mid-market - which has traditionally been less-well served than the top end of the industry. However, some providers report agent numbers in the thousands. Contact centres below 50 seats, while having the potential requirements for more sophisticated functionality without capital expenditure, are reported by some vendors as being the most difficult to dislodge from their incumbent technology. In such operations, especially stand-alone contact centres (i.e. not a departmental operation, or part of a larger overall contact centre), there can be significant inertia coming from the IT management (often under-resourced and fearful of their own future) and the contact centre management (focused entirely on day-to-day operations without the time or perhaps remit to look strategically at alternative options).

Only 5% of UK contact centres solely rely on cloud solutions, with 33% using hybrid cloud/CPE and 62% CPE only. Unsurprisingly then, new business for solution providers tends to come not from replacing competitive incumbent cloud companies, but from replacing on-premise technology, and from entirely new start-ups.

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PRICING AND CONTRACTS

Some vendors say that cloud-based solutions don't impact particularly positively on their profitability, as revenues from contracts are recognised over a number of years, rather than immediately in the case of many on-premise sales. It does however provide a guaranteed income stream and help cashflow forecasts, allowing them to run their business with a greater confidence and stability, which is obviously helpful for their customers as well.

For most vendors, especially those offering a multi-tenant model, the cost of maintaining and upgrading the solution is lower, which impacts positively upon their own costs.

Contract lengths vary, but are generally in place for at least a year, more often two or three. Some vendors provide a zero-commitment option but these are likely to work out pro-rata perhaps 40-50% more expensive than long-term contracts. Solution providers differ widely in their contract offers, with some operating a very flexible 'per logged hour' billing system, whereas others will want an agreed minimum number of agents per month, with additional users billed as required.

Pricing will of course depend on the features and functionality that clients choose to use, although the following table gives some idea of what users can actually expect to pay:

Figure 7: Pricing examples

Functionality / size

Price (£ per agent per month)

Small contact centre - voice only £80 - £120 (typical £95)

Small contact centre - full blended and multichannel £125 - £200 (typical £150)

Enterprise - voice only £35 - £90 (typical £60)

Enterprise - full blended and multichannel £60 - 140 (typical £100)

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Further notes on pricing:

• Potential cloud clients should also check and include the cost per minute of delivering and making calls

• Non-standard service requests (such as customisation, extra reporting etc) will also usually be charged for separately, with a rate of £70-£100 per hour being typical

• Multichannel functionality may be added on a per-seat basis, including email, social media and chat. Extra pricing of £20-30 per agent per month per extra channel can be expected

• Most cloud vendors offer pricing on a per-seat/per-month basis, but some offer the even more granular approach of per logged hour, which is of particular interest to outbound telemarketing companies and outsourcers, for whom this directly impacts upon profitability, with daily viewing of billing offered by some vendors

• Standard service level agreements start at around 99.7% guaranteed availability, with some vendors offering 99.999% on a premium contract. If these SLAs are not met, vendors will offer reduced rates as compensation. Service levels offered by some vendors may differ depending on contact type, although with the true multi-tenancy approach, everyone gets the same service levels.

Thought Leadership

By Michael Gray, Marketing Director, Ultra Communications [email protected] +44 (0)203 106 0668

Can your Cloud partner monitor performance in real time? Thousands of organisations now use Cloud services to power their customer contact centres. In fact, statistics given by a leading Cloud analyst firm suggest that the global Cloud contact centre services market grew by over 40% in 2010 – with similar growth estimated for both 2011 and 2012.

But it’s clear that not all Services Providers are the same. Some Cloud vendors, for example, focus on connecting inbound and outbound calls. Some focus on specialist software tools to improve customer choice and enhance advisor productivity, while others focus on consultancy and advice, especially in areas that can enhance service quality, productivity and customer experiences.

As the Cloud contact centre matures, these specialisms will become increasingly important as organisations look to pick the right Cloud partner.

Cloud benefits

There are many reasons why organisations turn to Cloud vendors for their contact centre technology. Cloud services:

• Require no capital investment (with services often charged for on a pay-as-you–use basis) • Require less infrastructure, equipment and system integration • Provide technology resilience (with Cloud platforms often replicated in multiple telecom buildings and connected to

multiple telcos) • Readily support virtual contact centre working • Provide in-built business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities (in the unlikely event of a system outage or site

closure) • Are highly scalable and flexible • Support feature-rich and future-proof services (with system upgrades, server enhancements etc. taken care of as part

of the service) • Ensure a rapid time-to-market for new campaigns • Make it easy to deploy shared services across larger contact centre sites • Are supported by technical experts Proactive Performance Monitoring While these benefits are often discussed in the media, another advantage of the Cloud model is much less so - and that is Real Time Performance Monitoring. Yet it’s a benefit that’s every bit as important as any of the others listed. Think about it logically. Your Cloud service partner knows everything about your contact centre: how many advisors you have, what state they are in, how many calls are queuing etc. By virtue of providing your contact handling technology they also have a real time view of problems as they arise – everything from high advisor idle times to low dialler data levels, calls not reaching advisors, long call queues and lost connections due to malfunctioning internal systems. So, if your Cloud service partner is a contact centre specialist with years of operational experience, why not take advantage of this expertise in a proactive way? Many organisations have already bought into the idea of Cloud-based real-time performance monitoring, choosing to use network-based specialists rather than employ in-house managers and analysts such as dialler managers. Other organisations have chosen to supplement their in-house teams with Cloud infrastructure, operational and telephony experts, using their skills to spot problems, identify opportunities to improve productivity, and create new strategies to improve quality. Real time performance monitoring isn’t just about saving time and money, it’s also about improving service quality, enhancing first call resolution, improving advisor productivity and enhancing customer satisfaction.


66

KEY MARKET SECTORS

The suitability of cloud-based solutions by vertical market segmentation is perhaps less relevant than some other contact centre functionality, being more a factor of the individual organisation's requirements for flexibility, access to Capex funding, attitude to IT and the state of their existing systems.

Having said that, the outsourcing sector has been very quick to embrace cloud technology, with the very nature of their business is a cultural fit with the idea of letting a third-party take control of non-core activities. The ability to add and shed agents very quickly, coupled with the definite knowledge of the associated cost appeal to the way in which these organisations do business, which also enables them to produce very aggressive and detailed bids for new work without fear of long technology implementation times. The movement away from high-volume outbound campaigns into more of a blended environment has also put pressure on certain types of outsourcer to include new functionality, and cloud offers a quick and integrated way to do this.

Formerly a major growth pool in the industry, public sector contact centres have seen investment budgets slashed in recent years with little hope of a reversal in the near future. Many local government IT departments have been decimated in cost-cutting exercises. Cloud-based solutions offer a way to maintain a good level of functionality without having a large in-house IT operation, while keeping costs low and predictable. However, some vendors report that this is a very difficult market sector to sell into at the moment, with a high degree of inertia due to the defensive attitude towards any new expenditure and the shedding of knowledgeable and experienced resources.

Seasonal contact centres (such as retail, travel and outsourcing) are also a major target for cloud-based solution providers, who can add pay-as-you-go functionality almost immediately. Even paying a premium for a short-term usage contract will be far cheaper for a contact centre which would otherwise have to buy extra full licences at a far higher cost.

Departmental contact centres have also been quick to consider cloud-based solutions, as their IT operations may not fit with the rest of the organisation and can be a burden rather than a strategic asset. Cloud offers them a chance to take control of their own destiny, rather than be a small part of a much larger whole that may be moving in another direction. Such departmental contact centres may be in the sales and marketing function, which means that outbound functionality is of great concern to them.

The SME (small-medium enterprise) sector is particularly interested in cloud-based solutions, particularly the 50-200 seat sector. Their desire for the rich functionality available to large enterprises has been dampened by the cost of implementation, as well as the general lack of IT in-house resource available to fine-tune and customise it so as to get the most of the solution. Previous years have seen numerous attempts by leading on-premise solution providers to cut down their top-level offerings to suit the mid-market, but it has been difficult to offer something of real value at a reasonable price without alienating their existing customer base or cannibalising their own revenue streams, despite the large proportion of operations industry-wide being in the SME bracket. Cloud-based solutions alleviate much of the requirement for in-house resource, as well as offering an Opex solution at a lower price point for sophisticated functionality, and is a hugely attractive option for this sector of the market. The SME sector is far more likely to take up cloud-based solutions wholesale, whereas many solution providers report that large enterprises will evolve into cloud piece-by-piece.

67

At an enterprise level, organisations that are young and rapidly-growing that don't have the experience or incumbent team to run their own contact centre are prime candidates to consider cloud. Where the contact centre is dynamic: adding and shedding agents as required, whether contract-based or seasonal - cloud is also a good fit. Organisations where finding Capex is difficult are of course also more likely to look at cloud-based solutions. Many solution providers report that enterprises have shown significant growth in interest in cloud-based solutions over the past 12 months, with some former CPE providers now stating that the majority of new sales are for their cloud-based solution, even at the top-end of the market.

Cloud-based solutions are finding their way into even the most risk-averse verticals, such as finance and healthcare, for which the importance of customer/patient data security cannot be overestimated. Standards such as HIPAA and SSAE 16 must be complied with, and many cloud providers have made it part of their strategy to meet or exceed the prescribed levels of security and audit in order to be able to address these markets and take away one of the most pressing issues faced by these clients.

300-3000 Hz

Voice Bandwidth

Voice Energy

0 Hz 300 Hz 3.4 kHz 4 kHz 7 kHz

0-4000 Hz

HIGH DEFINITION VOICE – A REAL DIFFERENCE?

Hear the difference at www.gagenetworks.com

Everyone has heard of High Definition (HD) voice, but what will it bring to your business? Natalie Stewart, Product Director at Gage Networks, explains the often overlooked benefits of HD Voice and why it is becoming the essential telephony feature of today.

What is High Definition or HD Voice (or wideband voice)? Like so many commonly accepted phrases in the communications industry it is a loose term, which is not properly defined, for a set of technology advances which have improved the quality of a voice experience over that of the traditional public telephone network.

This improvement can be achieved in a couple of ways: by increasing the sampling rate of the audio stream or increasing the range of frequencies over which the sample is taken. The second point is taken generally as the definition of HD today.

In that case, why can we understand SD speech as well as we can? The answer is simple: the human brain is a sophisticated machine and will exert its energy to make up for information that technology cannot provide.

When the brain is presented with a confusing sound it analyses the context of the conversation in two ways:

Grammatically – ‘I have to tie my choose’ does not make sense – it must mean shoes.

Situation - where there are several grammatical options the brain analyses the context of the conversation to make the most likely choice.

All of this takes valuable brain power and significantly increases the fatigue of the listener.

In summary, HD voice gives us: the ease of deciphering words that have close sounds such as ‘s’ and ‘f’; the ability to hear faint talkers and more easily keep up when more than one person is speaking; a reduced effort of listening because the brain is doing less work.

This leads to the conclusion that HD voice translates into real business benefits, meaning that it should be considered as far more than a “nice to have” but rather an essential telephony feature resulting in reduced caller fatigue and increased productivity.

To understand the impact of HD we need to look at the human voice, which produces sounds ranging from approximately 30 Hz to 18,000 Hz. That being said, it is the lower frequencies where most of the speech energy and richness are located. As can be seen from Figure 1, this makes the majority of the necessary sounds for intelligible speech fall within the Standard Definition (SD) range of 300Hz to 3.4 kHz – after all, we can all understand an SD phone call, most of the time.

The HD range is expanded to 50 Hz – 7 kHz. The obvious question then is: why bother with the rest of the spectrum?

To answer this question we must look at which sounds are created at different frequencies:

16 Hz to 32 Hz – the human threshold of feeling a sound, and the lowest pedal notes of a pipe organ.

32 Hz to 512 Hz – the rhythm frequencies, where the lower and upper bass notes lie.

512 Hz to 2048 Hz – sounds which define human speech intelligibility but give a horn-like quality.

2048 Hz to 8192 Hz – gives presence to speech, where labial and fricative sounds lie, such as ‘p’ and ‘t’.

8192 Hz to 16384 Hz – the highest notes give the brilliance in the sound of bells and the ringing of cymbals. In speech, the sound of the letter "s" is located from 8000-11000 Hz.

This shows that a significant proportion of differentiating sound is located above 4 kHz – it is here that we tell the difference between the sounds s and f; p and t; m and n. To put this into context, "p" and "t" - one of the most commonly confused pairs - account for over 10% of sounds in simple speech, "m" and "n" another 10.3%.

Figure 1 - Standard Definition 'clips' almost half the frequencies used by the human voice.

1.

2.

69

CONCLUSION

The general view from the vendor community is that cloud-based contact centre solutions are an evolution in the industry, rather than being revolutionary. At the top end of the market, the sunk costs, complex processes and in-house expertise held by the largest and most-established contact centres make it very unlikely that a wholesale move to cloud will happen in the short-term. However, at the technology end-of-life stage even in these large operations, cloud is now a credible option to take. The power that switch providers used to have over the contact centre industry has been long broken, and even the most risk-averse and conservative companies are exploring other options to the traditional on-premise model.

For many established operations, cloud-based solutions are an addition to their armoury, not a complete substitution. It is thought that the majority of current new implementations have at least some element of cloud-based solutions involved and most vendors report very significant growth in cloud deployments, certainly compared to their premise-based offerings, although the proportion of contact centres using only cloud technology is still proportionally small. A recent study of UK contact centres found that while 38% of respondents were using some cloud-based functionality, the proportion of cloud-only contact centres was below 5%3.

In terms of functionality, the core contact centre functionality is well-entrenched in the solutions studied in this report. There is a great deal of focus generally upon adding real-time analytics, social media management as part of a wider multimedia functionality set, and in improving the reporting capabilities offered.

Large enterprises in particular will demand the delivery of calls via MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching, an initiative that integrates information about network links - bandwidth and latency - into IP in order to improve IP-packet exchange and thus call quality), and this is something that future cloud-based solution providers will have to address. Much of the existing hosted market used to be about billing call minutes, but this has already changed, with the commoditisation of call traffic meaning that solution providers have to look elsewhere for their differentiators.

A major driver for cloud-based contact centre solutions is that more and more of the CRM market is moving to the cloud. As ingrained cultural and technical inhibitors to outsourcing enterprise IT are broken, it is dragging contact centre functionality along with it, with the presence of tight integration between contact centre and CRM functionality already present in many cloud providers' solutions.

Despite cloud-based contact centre solutions offering smaller operations the biggest potential jump in functionality and performance, there is still a reluctance to engage with vendors to understand the reality of what cloud can bring. This segment of the market (sub-50 seats) is the largest by number of operations, but a mixture of overwork at an IT and operational level, the view of senior management that such contact centres may not be strategic and the reassurance of having technology in place that already works satisfactorily means that the functional gap between small and large operations is in danger of growing further.

3 ContactBabel, "The UK Contact Centre Decision-Makers' Guide 2012"


70

THE VENDOR COMMUNITY

As cloud is a technology deployment model, rather than a technology itself, painting a clear picture of the industry would be very difficult.

Solution providers fall into various classes, including cloud-only contact centre software vendors, vendors which provide CPE, cloud and hybrid software, network & hosted solution providers, telcos and POP & datacentre owners.

While the sponsors of this report do not represent the whole of the industry, they do cover a large number of current implementations, and their various approaches and attitudes to cloud-based contact centre solutions provides the reader with a wider understanding of the opportunities that cloud offers.

In the interest of giving a fuller picture, readers should also be aware that we believe the following companies are also amongst those more active in the cloud-based contact centre space: 2e2, 3cLogic, Aspect Software, Avaya, Bright Cloud, BT, Cable & Wireless, CCT, Cisco, Cloud9, ComputerTalk, Contactual (8x8), ContentGuru, Convergys, Datapoint, Echopass, eGain, Genesys, Huawei (eSpace), inContact, InfinityCCS, Intelecom, IPscape, Kana, Maxima, MPL Systems, ONI, OPEX Hosting (Business Systems), Oracle, Pegasystems, Protocall One, RightNow, Salesforce.com, SAP, Siemens (Openscape), Spanlink, Starpound, Telus International, Transera, USAN, Vocalcom, VoltDelta, West IP Communications and XO.

The following section profiles the sponsors of this Guide, including their products, customer base and strategy.

71

ALTITUDE SOFTWARE

The Altitude Solution:

Founded in 1993 as Easyphone, and with offices in 16 countries, Altitude Software is a leading provider of unified interaction solutions. Its cloud-based solution - Altitude Cloud Contact Centre - consists of SIP-based media voice switch providing ACD and universal queue functionality, IVR and voice portal, outbound dialler (preview, power and predictive modes), multimedia management, agent desktop with softphone, recording, scheduling, monitoring, web services and out-of-the-box connectors and APIs. It is very similar to its premise-based solution, with the main difference being the cloud customer portal which provides a simplified level of access to the system (e.g. a telemarketer would be able to upload data, listen to voice recordings, etc). Altitude partners with hosting specialists who provide datacentres, networks and power etc. to improve security and reliability.

The next 12-24 months will see Altitude continue to enhance outbound functionality, contact list management and new channel capability, including social media and workflow for back office processes, with the current focus being on improving the customer portal. In line with the market, blended inbound/outbound and voice/multimedia options will be supported more strongly.

Customers and implementations:

Altitude has around 50 companies using its cloud solutions in Europe, with the Nordics being the hub of this at around 1,000 agents. Altitude's core market is currently outsourcers, with mid-sized (50-200 seat) operations being particularly important to it. Altitude Cloud Contact Centre has not yet launched in the US, but the company is taking active steps to enter this significant market.

Altitude reports that a typical implementation will take around ½ day of work, with a normal lead-time from order to production of around 5 days. Basic training for agents is less than ½ hour, and training for management in using the customer portal and viewing standard reports will typically be ½ day or less. Another ½ day is usually spent in ad-hoc after-sales support as needed.

Pricing may be done on a per-logged-hour basis, although per seat/per month options are also available. Flexibility of adding and changing agents is key, with the 'call centre on-tap' being seen as the end goal.

Opinion on market:

Altitude does not see cloud as a substitute for premise-based solutions, but as an additional option for those businesses which might otherwise find getting the funding for this level of functionality to be difficult, or who look at managing their own IT as a burden rather than a strategic choice. Like many other cloud solution providers, Altitude is finding that the decision to move to cloud is not just financial, but about how companies wish to buy and operate IT, and the functionality that they can afford using various delivery models. The outsourcing market in particular has a very strong desire to look at alternatives to owning its own IT, along with departmental and other piecemeal operations where no decision has to be made about the entire IT infrastructure. However, opportunities also exist for organisations that are young and growing rapidly and which don't yet have large incumbent IT departments to move to the cloud early in the cycle.

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ENGHOUSE INTERACTIVE

The Enghouse Interactive Solution:

Enghouse Interactive’s integrated suite of solutions includes multi-channel contact centre, self-service, attendant operator consoles and workforce optimisation, placing them in the position to offer customers and partners a complete, fully featured solution from a single vendor. Solutions scale from a single site call reception console to multi-tenanted, multi-media contact centres with users in excess of 10,000. The company has more than 1 million agent seats handling over 1 billion interactions through its systems daily.

Enghouse Interactive’s solutions support the full range of deployment methods from premise-based, through to private, public or community cloud and even hybrid requirements. More than 700 customers are using cloud-based solutions from Enghouse Interactive, with 75,000+ seats worldwide. The company provides multi-channel contact centre technology to enterprises around the globe, both directly and via many of the world’s top telcos and service providers who use Enghouse Interactive’s multi-tenant platforms at the core of their cloud contact centre offerings.

Enghouse Interactive's cloud solution offers a multichannel suite of contact centre functionality that can be accessible from anywhere on one unified platform including multichannel capabilities – Voice, Email, Video, WebChat, Co-Browsing, FAX SMS; IVR/ Self Service; CTI –Integrations; ACD functionality; Automated outbound; real-time and historical reporting & recording and quality monitoring.

Enghouse has a number of different deployment options for its cloud-based solution

• Public Cloud: Delivered through strategic partners across the world – a prepackaged ready to go contact centre in the cloud, removing the requirements of managing complex contact centre technology yet at the same time still giving control and access to a fully-functional, utility-based model

• Private Cloud: for businesses that prefer to own and manage their own technology, a number of enterprises, outsourcers, telcos use the multi-tenancy platform to create their own private cloud to serve all their distributed operations/ customers

• Community Cloud: some enterprises are turning to customers/ partners to work together to spread cost and resources where the infrastructure is shared between several organisations, which can be managed internally or by a third-party - this works within environments of multiple companies, mergers or divisions.


Cloud customers can come in all shapes and sizes: typical customers have multi-locations, peaks in demands, and multi-language requirements, which can expand across multiple verticals. Enghouse Interactive's customer base includes organisations with anything from five to thousands of agents.

In the traditional, pre-cloud IT environment, most of the IT decisions were made within the IT department. Enghouse Interactive now sees that pressure is coming from all parts of the organization to move to cloud, with the finance department viewing cloud as a way to reduce costs, and marketing/sales departments as a chance to improve revenues. The ultimate decision maker should be responsible to the lines of business benefiting or participating in the implementation of the cloud. In most cases this is IT and the CIO, with other areas of the business acting as influencers.

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Enghouse Interactive's product roadmap includes building on existing rich multimedia capabilities to enhance the platform in social media interactions, mobility and HD video.

Opinion on market:

Enghouse Interactive states that businesses need to ensure that they do not focus too much of their attention on issues around size, with a range of other questions to address when planning the roll-out and operation of a contact centre. Cloud opens the mind to opportunity and possibilities as it takes the property strategy out of the contact centre and introduces new concepts such as homeworking, shared services, global operations and option to trial new markets at a reduced risk.

Enghouse Interactive believes that cloud-based services have reached a maturity that make them now interesting for all organisations to consider as options, especially for small and medium-size organisations that lack technical expertise or seek an OPEX-based model. Recently, Enghouse Interactive has noticed an uptake in community cloud or shared services models in many industries, especially in central and local government, health care and global multi-divisional organisations.

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FIVE9

The Five9 Solution:

Five9 launched its first cloud product in 2003, aimed at the outbound market for small- and medium-sized businesses. In 2007, it increased its focus on inbound activity and a blended solution. In 2009, Five9 created sales, professional services, and support teams focused on the enterprise market. In 2010, the Five9 Virtual Call Center Release 8 added over 100 features including speech recognition to its core functionality, which includes ACD, IVR, call recording and quality monitoring, sophisticated outbound functionality, cloud APIs and CRM integration. Five9 also offers call and screen recording, quality management, speech analytics, and workforce management products based on a multi-tenant hosted offering of the NICE product line. The solution is multi-tenant, with a single provisioning interface. Five9 has two datacentres for redundancy, in San Jose and New York, and efficiently uses platform resources with up to 130 clients on the same set of servers. Upgrades are done in groups, with all features working the same between upgrades and new functionality available to use at the clients' own pace.

The product roadmap includes adding multimedia and social media management capabilities in the near future, with reporting enhancements (drill-down / drill-through), advanced analytics and browser-based user interfaces planned within the next 12 months.


Five9 has around 1,500 customers, of which around 250 are larger than 50 seats. It currently focuses efforts on North America, with significant customer bases in Latin America, India, and the Philippines as well. Larger clients include SupportSeven, Universal Healthcare, Dun & Bradstreet and Expert Planet.

Five9 is strong in the outsourcing space, noting that such businesses like to know exactly what each seat and element of functionality will cost them so that they can bid aggressively for new work, a benefit that cloud-based solutions can offer. There is also a recent movement to enterprise implementations, as many of these are looking at alternatives to existing premise-based equipment.

Implementations tend to take a matter of days, with around 8 hours of training and installation required in many cases. For enterprise implementations, it will typically take around 4 weeks. Five9 sees its professional services and customer support as a differentiator, offering a dedicated PS team that goes on-site to 'train the trainer' in person, and on-going support from a team of resources focused on the enterprise accounts.

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Opinion on market:

Five9 sees the market for cloud-based solutions as being particularly attractive for businesses which value flexibility. While the cost issue - Opex vs Capex - is still important, it has taken more of a back seat since the depths of the economic crisis. The credibility of the cloud has increased as consumers use it successfully, which translates into the business environment as well. Five9 sees many new enterprise clients looking firstly at cloud-based solutions for a departmental initiative such as outbound marketing campaigns, for whom a definite known cost, per-minute billing and ease of implementation is particularly attractive. Five9 sees multi-tenancy as a key to providing low-cost, high functionality service as it reduces the costs for the solution provider associated with maintenance, implementation and upgrades, allowing it to pass the cost savings onto clients. Although some business is won from other cloud providers, Five9 sees that replacing existing on-premise equipment at end-of-life is a rapidly-growing opportunity.

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GAGE NETWORKS

The Gage Networks Solution:

GageNet, Gage Networks’ Cloud Communications Delivery Platform, provides enterprise-grade global IP Telephony, Cloud Contact Centre, Video Conferencing and Multi-Party Bridging Services, with global short-code dialling plans and High Definition audio and video. Cloud Contact Centre is a fully-managed hosted solution, which supports intelligent- and skills-based routing to distributed agents, call queuing across multiple sites and call recording with ‘listen-in’ functionality. The only on-site equipment is the IP phones which arrive pre-configured, meaning that once delivered to site they simply require plugging in and the service is ready to use. Upon relocation of the contact centre, IP phones can simply be moved from one location to another.

Gage Networks customers benefit from real-time usage statistics, on demand capacity and 24/7/365 technical support, all under a single supplier with simple pay-as-you-go pricing and global coverage across Europe, Asia and the Americas.


Gage Networks does not charge a set-up fee for its Cloud Contact Centre services, and contract lengths start at one month duration. All Implementations are fully managed by an experienced Project Manager who documents requirements and co-ordinates delivery, testing and go-live closely with each customer. Every account is provided with a bespoke customer portal through which it can access reports and metrics.

Points of Presence across Europe, the US and Asia provide in-built resilience, from the server-level through to the Telco or Gateway break-out. Each platform fails over automatically to live backup systems ensuring that customers’ service continues to operate as normal should critical hardware failure occur.

Typical Gage Networks customers include global luxury retail brands, online businesses and the technology sector.

Opinion on market:

Based on a utility pricing model, cloud delivery realises cost savings with no significant capital expenditure, no set up fees and no need for a dedicated IT team to maintain the system. This simple pay per seat pricing structure provides a flexible and cost effective service helping businesses eliminate wastage by only paying for what they use. Gage Networks' solution provides High Definition voice delivering exceptional call quality and clarity; each call requires less than 100kbps of allocated bandwidth. Gage Networks believes that this standard of voice quality makes customer conversations easier and less stressful for both agent and customer, leading to better experiences, shorter call times and reduced agent fatigue.

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INTERACTIVE INTELLIGENCE®

The Interactive Intelligence Solution

Interactive Intelligence was founded in 1994. In 2009, building on their successful on-premise model, Customer Interaction Center™ (CIC) was introduced as a cloud product and the company has grown its customer base rapidly. The functionality of the cloud solution comes from the same code base as the established on-premise version, including ACD, multichannel, IVR/speech recognition, outbound automation, quality monitoring, call recording, real-time speech analytics and CRM integration. Interactive Intelligence delivers their cloud-based solution as a single-customer, multi-instance model, having each customer on a separate virtual machine, citing increased security and flexibility as the primary benefits of their approach..

Interactive Intelligence's cloud product roadmap includes mobile customer service applications, content management, and business process automation (including the routing and tracking of work processes throughout the enterprise).

Customers and implementations

Interactive Intelligence has more than 4,500 customers in 90 countries and is growing at around 20% year-on-year. Many of its cloud customers tend to be larger contact centres, with some running into the thousands. Referenced customers of its cloud-based solution include Philips Healthcare, New Era Tickets and Naviss Direct. The company is particularly strong in the finance, insurance and utilities sectors, which tend to be amongst the largest of contact centres in many countries. Interactive’s separate virtualised deployment models appeal to these sectors.

Interactive Intelligence offers three cloud deployment models:

Local Control VoIP Model: A hybrid option where voice infrastructure components such as gateways, media servers and IP phones – together with call recordings and customer data – remain on the customer’s premise and connect via MPLS to the CIC application server residing in a hardened Interactive Intelligence data centre. All media traffic and recordings remain inside the customer’s network providing an added level of security. This is the most popular option with customers.

Remote Control VoIP Model: A centralised option where all components – voice infrastructure and CIC application server – reside in a hardened Interactive Intelligence data centre.

Remote Control TDM Model: A centralised option that lets customers continue using existing PBX infrastructure for delivering calls to agents. No new on-premise equipment is required. The option is very quick to deploy and requires little to no change to the network.

Additionally, Interactive Intelligence offers a service called 'Quick Spin' – a portal-based option to allow companies to trial the cloud-based solution at no charge for a limited time.

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Opinion on market

Interactive Intelligence has seen take-up of its cloud-based solutions grow very rapidly in recent years, driven by the requirements for increased flexibility, faster deployment times and a desire for reduced IT requirements. While minimal upfront expense is appreciated, it is less important than in 2009 and 2010. Its customers tend to be larger with increased functionality requirements than those of its multi-tenant cloud-based rivals. Interactive sees its long experience in delivering contact centre solutions and its 'virtual machine' deployment model as attractive to these types of clients in particular.

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LIVEOPS

The LiveOps Solution:

The LiveOps cloud contact centre solution is divided into three parts, LiveOps Platform, Applications and Talent. LiveOps Platform provides turnkey contact centre functionality in the cloud. LiveOps Applications provides agents and managers integrated multichannel interaction capabilities across voice, email, web chat, social media (including Twitter and Facebook) and SMS, all backed by intelligent multichannel routing, real-time reporting and recording across every channel. LiveOps Talent provides access to LiveOps’ community of 20,000+ home-based, US-based, independent contractors for outsourcing services.

The LiveOps cloud contact centre solution is pre-integrated to work with on-premise TDM telephony hardware, as well as SIP, with APIs to third-party solutions such as NICE, Monet, Salesforce.com and others. The solution is accredited PCI-compliant (for payment card data), HIPPA-compliant (for healthcare markets), with Sarbanes-Oxley and SAS70 type-2 compliance (finance). LiveOps currently has three data centres in New York, Las Vegas and London, with a fourth opening shortly in Singapore.

LiveOps' product roadmap for the second half of 2012 includes further integration with Salesforce.com's latest Open CTI release (which includes Mac support), international expansion further into Asia with Singapore datacentre supporting LiveOps' APAC customers and new business, and enhanced reporting (real-time and multichannel visibility for both agents and contact centre managers).


LiveOps operates the largest cloud contact centre in the world supporting 250+ external customer operations as well as its own community of 20,000+ independent contractor agents. Named clients include Amway, Symantec, Salesforce.com, Proflowers, Pizza Hut, Royal Mail and AAA.

LiveOps is keen to point out that it offers more stringent service levels than most other cloud contact centre solution providers, with its 99.99% availability including scheduled maintenance time. Its active-active architecture allows customers to switch seamlessly to another instance without interrupting operations, and the company states that prospective customers should take note of this benefit when comparing availability.

LiveOps offers a 90-day opt-out to new customers, within which time clients may cancel their contract if they find that cloud solutions aren't for them. Typically, reported installation times are in the 2-3 week range.

LiveOps has a varied client base, with significant verticals including finance, hi-tech (including media and communications), retail and healthcare. Although it has several customers running thousands of seats, the vast majority are within the 75-500 seat range.

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Opinion on market:

LiveOps states that SMEs tend to embrace the cloud wholesale, whereas enterprises tend to evolve into the cloud, with selective implementations of functionality, or at a departmental-level. Finance, technology, retail and healthcare are all growing quickly in terms of cloud take-up, despite most of these sectors being extremely risk-averse where security over customer data is concerned.

The growing importance of multichannel support, with the further push from the uptake of social media as a customer service channel is focusing enterprises' decision-making on how to manage these interactions strategically, with cloud offering more of a turnkey alternative to the difficulty of managing and reporting such interactions in multi-location on-premise deployment. LiveOps sees the adoption of cloud contact centre a natural evolution that follows successful cloud implementations around CRM, back-office and HR processes.

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NEWVOICEMEDIA

The NewVoiceMedia Solution:

ContactWorld is a true, multi-tenant cloud contact centre solution, providing full contact centre functionality that is easy to implement, requires no capital outlay, has feature updates every 2 weeks and is supported by a 99.999% availability SLA and monitored by the NewVoiceMedia Trust site, (www.newvoicemedia/trust). Functionality includes ACD, outbound dialing (preview, progressive, predictive), call recording and archiving, supervisory reports, advanced analytics and real-time reporting, CRM integration (e.g. Salesforce.com), multimedia, speech analytics, workforce management and quality monitoring.

ContactWorld for Salesforce provides seamless integration between voice communications and the rest of Salesforce. It is a “native” solution, integrating directly with Salesforce cloud API’s and therefore does not require the use of a CTI adapter, meaning there are no downloads to install on local devices, and that any device (PC, Mac etc.) can be used. Intelligent routing on any field in Salesforce provides enhanced personalization capabilities.

ContactWorld PCI delivers a PCI-DSS Level 1 compliant solution supporting any merchant requiring PCI services. PCI-DSS compliance is a mandatory requirement for all merchants accepting card payments over the telephone to ensure their customers’ details are not compromised. As a level 1 provider NewVoiceMedia is externally audited every year. ContactWorld PCI can be used as either a standalone IVR service with no agent interaction or as a mid-call service where the agent transfers the caller to an automated system to make the payment.

NewVoiceMedia owns its own code - it does not use any third-party functionality - and implements mini-releases every two weeks. Its product roadmap in 2012 includes adding real-time workforce management functionality (which will link automatically to the current routing functionality), more sophisticated multichannel management and smartphone applications that will schedule call-backs and provide real-time queue information. Further ahead, it will deliver next generation skills-based routing, integrated eLearning, training and assessment packages, quality management upgrades, social media, screen recording and integration with other cloud CRM solutions and real-time speech analytics.


Currently focused largely upon the UK, NewVoiceMedia has doubled its customer base in the past 18 months (Q1 2011 - Q3 2012), with around 300 contact centres in 140 companies now using the solution. Its sweet spot is the 20-500 seat operations, with the 20-100 seat of particular interest. NewVoiceMedia is ISO27001-compliant, as well as having PCI DSS Level 1 certification.

Amongst its largest customers are ParcelForce and Totemic Group, numbering in the many hundreds of agents. Other referenced clients include Lumesse, a global leader in integrated talent management solutions; Marsh, a global leader in insurance broking and risk management; Cunningham Lindsay, one of the largest loss adjusting and claim management companies in the world; QlikTech, Cloud based BI solutions; and SHL, a global provider of talent management and psychometric testing.

http://www.newvoicemedia.com/trust

http://www.newvoicemedia/trust

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Opinion on market:

NewVoiceMedia sees cloud as a great opportunity to address the lack of functionality suffered by the mid-market due to the excessive cost and time of implementing enterprise-class, premise-based solutions. It rejects the concerns about multi-tenant security and hosted solution availability by highlighting that its solution has far greater redundancy, more physical security at the datacentre level, databases are partitioned and all recordings encrypted. It stands by its experience of implementing cloud-based solutions which has not meant that IT departments have been removed, but rather they now have more time to manage and implement the projects that help the business, rather than spend time in managing complex software upgrades and hardware maintenance. NewVoiceMedia sees cloud-based contact centre solutions as being driven by the huge recent and continuing growth in cloud-based CRM solutions, to which a cloud contact centre is well-suited.

NewVoiceMedia believes that business drivers will change in the short-term to be more focused on customer experience across marketing, sales and service. More specifically, it will be to deliver the best and most consistent customer experience, which is fast becoming the single biggest differentiator in the marketplace and which is also the hardest for competitors to emulate.

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NOBLE SYSTEMS

The Noble Systems Solution:

Noble Systems Corporation has been operating since 1989, with Noble Systems UK Limited being incorporated in 1999. The core Noble® Enterprise Solution suite comprises of ‘best-of-breed’ Outbound Dialler with full Call and Multimedia Blending capabilities, ACD and Call-Routing and comprehensive Management Information tools. All of the proposed functionality is available through the Noble Maestro Management Portal and the Noble Composer customised Agent Desktop. Collectively these two management and agent applications comprise the base platform for the Noble Enterprise Contact Centre Solution.

Maestro is Noble’s contact centre management software application and provides a single sign-on for managers/supervisors through which they can manage the entire contact centre. From an agent perspective, users of the Noble solution are provided with a single log-on to a fully unified agent desktop application, Noble Composer. Within this desktop, agents will undertake all of their call work, receiving calls, making outbound dials and receiving communications from customers via additional channels, such as SMS, email, social media and web.

Noble Enterprise Hosted is a complete contact centre solution, including outbound dialling, inbound ACD, blending, skills-based routing, IVR, call recording, agent and system monitoring, customisable agent workstations, CRM/collection software integration, workforce management (WFM), legislative compliance and results reporting.

Noble Cloud EC and Noble Messenger EC are evolutionary solutions that allow clients to access broader bandwidth instantly to expand contact centre capacity on demand, wherever agents are located. Featuring Noble’s ‘elastic capacity’ architecture, the EC platforms provide a hybrid CPE and CaaS environment that supports volume spikes, peak periods, new or temporary programs and work-from-home agents. Cloud EC and Messenger EC work with the client’s existing Noble Enterprise Solution platforms, enabling companies to expand their capacity when they need it.

Noble Hosted Disaster Recovery also supports disaster recovery options for clients, with flexible off-site data replication capabilities.


Within EMEA, major referenceable customers include ResQ Contact Services, Cabot Credit Management, Walter Services, Swinton Insurance, and Stellar. There is no typical Noble Systems customer, as they service contact centres from 20 seats to 1000’s of seats. A typical implementation takes approximately 3 weeks from the signing of the Functional Design Specification (FDS) if all parties can meet these dates. A typical Noble installation includes Manager Training with a 3 to 5 day system overview class, followed by 3 to 5 days of basic and scripting training. Additional training is available, as needed. Noble Systems generally utilizes a Train-the-Trainer approach, in which the Noble Trainer trains the client manager or training staff, after which the client delivers end-user and agent training. The Noble solution provides an easy-to-use desktop environment that makes it easy for agents to learn how to use and navigate the system. Agent training can typically be done in a couple of hours.

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Noble Systems cloud-based solutions were only recently introduced to the EMEA and APAC markets in Q1 and Q2 2012. In its brief time on the market, it has seen a strong growth and interest in the CaaS and CPE-CaaS hybrid solution offers.

Opinion on market:

The most common buying obstacles to overcome in the hosted market are concerns about continuity of service, limitations of features, security concerns, and support for future growth. Unlike some other cloud-based solution providers, Noble Systems has found that the IT Department is taking a lead role in the decision making process. Key initiators are the CIO and IT Director, with support from the executive levels.

Specifically for the Hosted market, Noble Systems is currently developing extended CPE/CaaS hybrid solutions whereby clients can take advantage of cloud-based Interaction Analytics and Workforce Management products that can be integrated with Noble’s premise Enterprise solution.

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ULTRA COMMUNICATIONS

The Ultra Communications Solution:

The Ultra Communications Management System (UCMS) is a network-based platform that delivers a range of inbound/outbound Cloud applications including: intelligent call management, predictive dialling, blended call handling, contact recording, voice portal, CTI, PCI compliant payment handling, campaign management and MI. Ultra carries out quarterly platform updates, with new functionality driven by client requirements. Ultra’s latest release has added call-back management and improved management reporting.

Ultra's is a pure multi-tenant solution, with the UCMS connected to multiple Telcos and Internet Service Providers, and with servers replicated in multiple telecom buildings, for secure, risk-free operation.

Ultra offers a standard service level guarantee of 99.98%, but states that in practice it is in excess of 99.999%. It offers a 7am-9pm real time performance monitoring service, meaning that Dialler and ACD management roles can be managed in the cloud rather than in-house.

The Ultra PCI solution is a hosted payment solution. It works by the agent prompting the customer when each piece of information is required, and the customer then using the buttons on their phone to type in their card details. DTMF tones are converted into flat tones and become completely unidentifiable to the agent. All calls can be recorded as normal to ensure that, if applicable, FSA regulations are met. Ultra states that, uniquely, its PCI solution can be delivered in four deployment models: through the cloud, on-premise, through IVR or through an integrated Ultra PCI/ Cloud contact centre solution.


Ultra currently has around 50 outbound and inbound clients including Leadx and Grant Thornton. The solution scales from support for 10 agents to many thousands of agents. Many of its clients are in the 100-500 seats range.

Ultra has grown quickly in the past 12 months, with 49% annualised growth reported in 2011/12. The majority of this growth has come from two sources: existing clients growing or deploying outside their original set-ups, and from word-of-mouth referrals and recommendations.

Implementation times differ dramatically by client. Discovery, Project Management and Build phases can usually be completed in less than seven days, although a great deal depends on existing client script documentation. A simple set-up can be available within 24 hours.

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Opinion on market:

Ultra's product development is driven very much by client requirements. It believes that (1) the stability of its platform (2) its ability to proactively monitor performance in real time, and (3) its ability to add and change agents flexibly, especially in an outbound environment, are key to its success. The company also believes that, for many clients, the argument for Operational Expenditure over Capital Expenditure is no longer as important as the functionality and flexibility of the delivered solution and Total Cost of Ownership.

Ultra reports that while IT departments are sometimes reluctant to adopt hosted and cloud solutions, the reality post-implementation is that many of its clients are able to benefit hugely by re-deploying IT resources to other value-add projects.

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THE SUPPLIER DIRECTORY

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Altitude Cloud provides flexible, reliable, easy-to-use cloud solutions for contact centres that need to be able to quickly set up intelligent campaigns and integrated services at a predictable, reduced cost.

Our state-of-the-art cloud solution is completely customisable and can be up and running within a matter of hours with little to no capital investment. Contact centres are able to scale up or down based on demand, while optimising resources, saving time and money.

Free from IT and communications operational tasks, contact centres can focus on their core business relationships to become more productive and competitive.

Contact:

w: www.altitude.com

Enghouse Interactive supplies the widest range of customer contact solutions on the market. Through our network of reseller partners, we help thousands of organisations of all sizes, industries and complexity across the world to improve their service, productivity and operational efficiency.

Our integrated suite of solutions, which include multi-channel contact centre, self-service, attendant operator consoles and workforce optimisation, can be deployed on-premise, in the cloud or hybrid. We support more than 1 million agent seats handling over 1 billion interactions through our systems daily – making Enghouse Interactive one of the biggest providers of customer contact solutions in the world.

Contact:

w: www.enghouseinteractive.com

t: +44 (0)2033 573040

e: [email protected]

http://www.altitude.com/

http://www.enghouseinteractive.com/




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Five9 is the largest pure cloud-based contact centre software provider with over 1,500 customers and processing more than 2 billion calls per year. The Five9 Virtual Contact Center and Predictive Dialer are revolutionizing the contact centre industry, bringing the power of the cloud to customer service, marketing and sales organizations around the globe. The company gives enterprises of all sizes access to sophisticated and innovative contact centre solutions quickly, at a cost of ownership far lower than traditional premise-based solutions.

Contact:

For more information on Five9, please visit www.five9.com or call 1-800-553-8159.

Cloud Communications: IP Telephony, Contact Centre, Audio and Video Conferencing.

Feature-rich Cloud Contact Centre, with intelligent and skills-based routing and calls queued in the cloud, treats multiple locations as a single virtual contact centre, with performance management enabled via sophisticated real-time and historic monitoring tools.

Long-term partnerships with Polycom, Cable&Wireless Worldwide, Cisco and BT give us knowledge and expertise to create innovative, relevant global solutions that provide economies of scale, cost efficiencies and resilience to support business continuity.

Customers are supported by a 24/7/365 Service Desk team and Customer Portal offers a full range of monitoring and support documentation.

Contact:

UK: 0800 015 1501 US: 1-212-381-0576 International: +44 207 339 1701


w: www.gagenetworks.com

http://www.five9.com/


http://www.five9.com/call-center-software/virtual-call-center.htm

http://www.five9.com/call-center-software/features/predictive-dialer.htm

http://www.five9.com/call-center-solutions/solutions-overview.htm



http://www.gagenetworks.com/



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Deliberately Innovative All-in-One Communications for Business.

Interactive Intelligence is a global provider of unified business communications solutions for contact centre automation, unified communications, and business process automation. The company’s standards-based all-in-one communications software suite was designed to eliminate the cost and complexity of multi-point systems. Founded in 1994 and backed by more than 4,500 customers worldwide, Interactive Intelligence is an experienced leader in delivering customer value through its cloud-based Communications as a Service (CaaS) or on-premise solutions, both of which include software, hardware, consulting, support, education and implementation.

At Interactive Intelligence, it’s what we do.

Contact:

a: Interactive Intelligence, 7601 Interactive Way, Indianapolis, IN 46278

t: 800.267.1364

w: www.inin.com

The LiveOps cloud contact centre offering provides a total solution – spanning from technology to talent to provide your enterprise choice – choice in how you source and deliver services to your clients.

Our LiveOps Platform, LiveOps Applications and LiveOps Talent meets the challenges facing your contact centre today and will transform your customer interactions in the cloud.

More than 250 global companies, including Salesforce.com, Symantec, Amway, ADP and AAA trust LiveOps to exploit the interactions between today's multichannel, social and mobile consumers and the enterprise contact centre to ultimately enhance brand preference.

Contact:

w: www.liveops.com

http://www.inin.com/

http://www.liveops.com/

http://www.inin.com


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NewVoiceMedia’s contact centre solutions, ContactWorld and ContactWorld for Salesforce, were created and are continuously being advanced to provide contact centre technology as a true cloud service over the Internet, similar to the business models of Amazon, Google and salesforce.com.

NewVoiceMedia customers benefit from enterprise-class contact centre functionality at a fraction of the cost of traditional systems, with the only equipment needed being a phone number and Internet connection.

As a true multi-tenant, cloud-based solution, customers always run on the latest version and are able to scale the service as the organisation demands, paying only for what they need.

Contact:

t: UK 0800 280 2888

t: US 1 877 890 2244

t: ROW +44 207 206 8888


w: www.newvoicemedia.com

Noble Systems is a global leader in unified contact centre technology solutions, providing innovative products since 1989.

Noble have recently launched our Enterprise Hosted offering as an alternative to our traditional premise-based systems, delivering a full-featured cloud-based CaaS platform.

In addition, Noble’s evolutionary Cloud EC and Messenger EC hosted options feature our ‘elastic capacity' architecture, providing a hybrid CPE and CaaS environment that allows you to instantly access broader bandwidth to expand your contact centre capacity on demand, supporting volume spikes, peak periods, new programs, work-from-home agents, etc and to help you grow your business.

Contact:

w: www.noblesys.com


http://www.newvoicemedia.com/

http://www.noblesys.com/



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Ultra Communications is an experienced supplier of pay-as-you-use Cloud contact centre services. Our network-based platform is highly featured, flexible, scalable and resilient to provide secure, risk-free and location-independent operation. Ultra applications include outbound dialling, inbound call management, voice portal, contact recording, PCI compliant card payment handling, customer callback and MI. Through its open architecture and APIs, the Ultra platform integrates to a broad range of popular CRM, speech analytics and back office systems. Our technical and operational experts provide unmetered 24x7x365 client support plus a unique proactive real-time performance monitoring service. Ultra solutions are fully OFCOM, DMA, PCI DSS, FSA and CSA compliant.

Contact:

a: Ultra Communications Ltd, The Granary, Cams Hall Estate, Fareham, Hampshire PO16 8UT (UK)

t: +44 (0)207 965 0207


w: www.UltraASP.net


http://www.ultraasp.net/


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APPENDIX: VENDOR RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

1. "How do we know customer data can’t be shown to other clients or hacked into? Is browser-based technology really secure? What sort of guarantees / certification should we look for?"

Vendor Response

Access to our service is given in two different ways – via https or via VPN. Both methods provide industry standard encryption, commonly used by banks and ebusiness companies. The https solution is also using certificates to verify the user. Once connected to the platform the user has to log in with a personal username and password. The profile of the user controls his/her user rights, with a sophisticated access control matrix. The system also has fully automated alarms, immediately attracting the attention of support engineers, to any identified attempts to breach security. To ensure that no client’s data can be accessed by other clients, all data has a unique key for the client that it belongs to, which prohibits other clients from gaining access.

Security concerns are usually related to the best practices and processes of the service provider. The cloud service needs to offer encryption, authentication, audit/logging, physical security, validation and business continuity. Many organisations outsource their centres to different countries around the world, which also raises data security concerns. Organisations must choose global cloud providers with a secure international service delivery platform. These experts know how to meet the availability, scalability and security requirements of multichannel contact centres.

All cloud-based contact center software providers consider secure architecture a mandatory capability. Often, the vendor's infrastructure is at least as secure as the vendor's clients' environments, since the vendor must meet the companies' security criteria. In some cases, vendors will submit to audits by their clients' IT or IS teams. While the needs may vary by industry, some considerations are common to all industries:

• Is data in transit encrypted using strong encryption, including web authentication, APIs, application data, call and screen recordings, etc.?

• Are user accounts secured with encrypted passwords, and does the system support rules for password complexity, expiration, history, and similar features?

• Are there features to avoid logging and storing sensitive data, such as payment card info? For sensitive data that is logged, are features available to encrypt the data?

• Does the vendor have secure data center facilities? Note: SAS 70 Type II is an excellent certification to use as validation for this.

• Does the vendor have a mature security organization and processes?

There are many security certifications that can be used to assess a vendor's maturity and utilization of security best practices, including: Cloud Security Alliance, Open Web Application Security Project, International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium, and CompTIA Security Community. Additionally, some vendors and/or their clients may be PCI or HIPAA certified.




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Like any service the reliability and security of a Cloud based solution is dependent upon the design specification. However because of its centralised nature a Cloud deployment can provide significantly enhanced reliability and security for less investment than a traditional site-by-site solution.

By hosting services in high integrity, fully redundant Data Centres, improved SLAs can be achieved across multiple locations while providing a secure and scalable service that can form a key role in a disaster recovery plan.

A Cloud deployment is often wrongly associated with an increased security risk because transit is often assumed to be by public Internet, the equipment isn’t located on-site or because sometimes Service Providers deploy to multiple customers from shared equipment. The simple method of obtaining network security is to install a private circuit such as an MPLS Network. Another option for securing Internet connections is by using IPSec VPN tunnels - this is a standard accepted method of securing traffic.

Moving equipment offsite is actually an opportunity to significantly improve security by hosting in an enterprise grade Data Centre. Security around these facilities is superior to most office locations.

Careful selection of a reputable cloud supplier will give confidence in security. They will have documented methods of segregating data from that of other Customers either by using separate servers (as Gage Networks does) or logical separation.

Security is always an important issue, especially when it comes to sensitive customer data. The only way to really know how protected your (customer) data will be is to begin dialogue between your IT/security team and the service being evaluated. It’s important to get beyond marketing messaging and talk details as they related to your specific environment and requirements. Discuss things such as data separation methods, where data resides, access control/physical security, network security, security monitoring, code of conduct, privacy policies and, ultimately, what level of protection is guaranteed under contract.

Certain cloud contact centre providers run single-customer, multi-instance virtualized environments in their datacentres. As well, some offer the option to keep voice traffic and sensitive customer data (including recordings) locally, within your own private network. These two architectural approaches – virtualisation and the hybrid, local control model – are freeing mission critical centres to move to the cloud by providing an added level of security and isolation.


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Modern data-use is distributed in nature and, as such, the controls that protect this data must also be distributed. Too often security controls focus on location alone to protect the perimeter of the building. However, as telecommuting is becoming more conventional and workers may access data from laptops outside of normal business hours, considerable data access exists outside the office walls.

Modern data protection controls must be data-centric rather than location-centric. They must follow the data out of the buildings to protect it no matter where it resides. LiveOps agents operate from distributed locations, as such we have created defense-in-depth data-centric controls to follow, and protect the data, and not just the conventional walls of the building. These include such controls as our distributed audit and fraud programs, Secure Exchange to control what data agents can hear or view, PC Protection to manage the agent’s desktop, and Screen Recording, which provides full visibility into the agent’s conversations and desktop.

This enterprise security model focuses on building value-add distributed controls that provide actual security, as opposed to the perceived value of often legacy controls surrounding an agent’s desk.

Companies should look for suppliers who have achieved accreditations such as PCI DSS Level 1 and if integration occurs between the Contact Centre technology and the CRM platform then both these suppliers should have set a security standard together and regular audit testing is completed.

It is likely that the only real customer data a cloud based Contact Centre will store will be the voice recordings. It is advisable to use a payment solution that both stops recording and removes the advisor from hearing the payment details. All other data stored within the Contact Centre platform is usually only configuration based data that is the logic to determine what treatment to give callers and where to route the call, so really does hold a minimum risk.

Therefore it is still necessary to only select Cloud based Contact Centres that can show a very comprehensive security layer between the internet and application, database and storage servers. Firewalls, Session Border Controllers and the ability to restrict access by users to only the areas of the system they should have access to are just a few basic requirements.

The most common forms of security gap are caused by human error, therefore strict enforcement of the IT policy to regularly change passwords, enforce use of special characters in passwords, deactivate unused accounts and run regular security audits are all best practise type processes which can be run on cloud based services in the same way as on premise platforms.



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The security question is often raised when discussing hosted contact centre solutions with our clients. They imagine that they will have access to each others’ systems, but in reality, this is never the case. With the Noble CaaS solution, VMware software is utilised to ensure that separate instances of software are used for each customer, meaning there is no security risk as it would be impossible for one customer to view another customer’s data. Each client system has its own IP address for additional security which is provided through our firewalls.

An important first step in taking control of information and helping to meet regulatory requirements is encrypting the contact centre’s sensitive data. Noble® Encryption at Rest (NEAR) offers a comprehensive range of encryption solutions designed to meet your data protection requirements. NEAR gives the security of file systems data encryption without significantly impacting the system performance.

If taking any customer payments, it’s important to choose a hosted supplier that is PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant to ensure that your customers’ personal information is protected and that credit card transactions are processed securely.

It is also important to make sure that your hosted supplier has databases located in individual virtual server hosts specific to one tenant. The databases must be in individual VM hosts for that tenant so that the front end DSNs can be set up to talk to that specific database to collect and render data. It is also important for security reasons that the host is related to only one tenant.

Tight security is essential and, when selecting a Cloud vendor, it’s important that organisations check out the physical protection and security policies of potential; partners. Questions that need to be asked include:

• Are Cloud platform resources distributed across multiple Telcos/ISPs and multiple locations?

• Do Cloud vendor systems reside outside your own technical infrastructure? Will they require direct integration or physical on-site installation?

• What firewall, intrusion prevention, antivirus, anti-spyware, Web application firewall, VoIP security, IM/P2P blocking and Web filtering protection is provided?

• What storage and backup is provided to ensure data cannot be lost through either software or physical failure?

• What security audits of capabilities, including intrusion detection tests, are regularly provided by third party network security specialists?

• Are servers fully mirrored to provide business continuity even in the event of a disaster striking (and without the need for you to make additional contingency investments)?

• What access security is provided? Is access only available to authorised staff through, for example, card-controlled, CCTV-monitored entry systems? Are network entitlements controlled by unique IDs and regularly audited ‘strong’ password policies with automated failure lockout?



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2. Where do the biggest cost savings come from?

Vendor Response

Cost savings are slightly different from business to business.

Outsourcers primarily save cost by having a fully flexible pay-per-usage fee – when production volumes are high, and more revenue is normally generated, the cost for the technical platform is higher, whilst the cost is lower when production volumes are low, and less revenue is generated. To be able to cut back, without having a fixed cost for the technical platform equates to major savings – as well as much less risk to manage – for an outsourcer.

For the enterprise user, that tends to have a much more stable volume, the major savings come from being able to downsize or even eliminate internal IT costs. With no need for keeping and maintaining skills and resources in-house, and user interfaces optimised for operational staff the cost savings are very significant.

Other very important savings come from turning Capex into Opex.

Timescales – In a traditional contact centre project you can be looking at least a year cycle from requirements, procurement to delivery. Cloud allows you to react quickly to changes in the market and not think about the size of contact centre but rather strategy, which gives cost savings in line with your bottom line strategy. Property / resource – a public cloud environment eliminates in-house hardware investment, as well as related IT infrastructure, maintenance and upgrade expenses, driving savings. In the same way within the private cloud you can log on from any environment so you are not tied to a place, you can expand into new markets easily within extended scalability. Functionality – Having a unified cloud contact centre platform it gives the access to all contact centre elements, which can be access from anywhere. The cost is reduced without having to purchase individual boxes and interconnect.

While ROI and TCO varies by company and industry, the biggest cost savings from cloud-based contact center software are typically in:

• Reduced long-term (3-5 year) license fees due to flexible monthly billing (pay only for what you need).

• Significantly reduced one-time deployment and implementation costs, since there is little or no hardware .

• Lower IT operational costs, since IT resources can focus on enhancing business operations rather than administering hardware and software architecture.

• Improved agent productivity, particularly when the superior integration capabilities of cloud-based solutions are utilized to unify contact center and CRM systems.




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Based on a utility pricing model Cloud delivery realises real cost savings with no significant capital expenditure, no set up fees and no need for a dedicated IT team to maintain the system. This simple pay per seat pricing structure provides a flexible and cost effective service helping businesses eliminate wastage by only paying for what they use.

A fully managed secure global solution for video and voice, brings Telephony, Contact Centre and Video Conferencing together under a single invoice, supplier and point of contact. With only endpoints at each customer site you don't need to worry about ISDN lines, number ranges, service providers, capacity, servers or PBXs. A Cloud Communications solution allows global companies, on average, to consolidate eight suppliers into one single supplier, one bill and one point of contact, saving an estimated 25 hours per month on supplier management alone.

When it comes to cost savings, it really depends on your existing environment and planned approach. We encourage companies to compare financial impacts of both models, cloud and premise, as they relate specifically to their environment in order to round out the view across a given period. The answer is always in the details. Human capital is expensive and cloud solutions require fewer resources to operate, in general. However, what’s interesting is that most companies we speak to don’t end up reducing headcount when moving to the cloud, but rather re-focus resources to address more strategic imperatives or initiatives that have not been able to be addressed due to a lack of resources. This gets to another interesting point – drivers for the cloud have gone well beyond financial benefits. Companies are looking to leverage the cloud to increase flexibility (e.g., dynamically and economically scale up and down to address seasonality and growth), speed up deployment times, and free-up IT staff for other work.

The biggest cost savings will come from converting a capital expenditure to an operating expenditure. Additionally, companies can reduce the number of in-house resources required to operate and maintain these systems. On average the majority of savings realized in the first year are elimination of maintenance costs. Most organizations are able to achieve a roughly 30-40% decrease in TCO. Finally, most companies can be up and running in the cloud in days rather than months, another significant savings.


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Multi-tenancy and IP ownership offer the biggest cost advantage. The ability of the provider to deliver greater utilisation of hardware and operational costs through true cloud and multi-tenancy ensures a lower per customer cost. The cost for an individual company to build and maintain an infrastructure that delivers equivalent functionality is significantly more, not to mention the costs of redundancy, security and performance, which are all included in the Cloud providers pricing.

True Cloud is also significant; True cloud providers build and maintain their own code base. This is important as there are no licence fees to pay to the software providers, allowing Cloud vendors to amortise development costs over their entire user base; in addition owning the software allows true cloud vendors to make continual feature improvements to their service, with updates as often as every 2 weeks. Companies who use a mixture from different vendors of on premise Contact Centre technologies will be paying (both time and cost) to keep software levels compatible between products, however using a single cloud provider this is a problem and cost that does not exist.

Other cost savings come from administration, hardware and software maintenance, infrastructure costs (power, cooling, etc) and management (patches, upgrades, testing, etc), redundancy and security.

Noble's clients have indicated that the top cost savings from using our hosted solution come from removal of multiple service providers, less expensive network solutions and reduced IT demands.

Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) vendors normally charge 15-20% of original licence costs simply to maintain their solutions - and support is typically a reactive service triggered by the occurrence of problem events, with inherent delays in analysis and correction of faults.

Support models provided by pay-as-you-use Cloud vendors such as Ultra are very different. Rather than charge an annual maintenance fee, support charges are frequently based on productive usage of Cloud services and the number of people concurrently using services. And with revenues based on clients’ productive use of services, support personnel are highly motivated to address support issues well within the timescales published in Service Level Agreements. This can lead to huge cost savings.




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3. " How does cloud-based functionality compare to on-premise?"

Vendor Response

Generally speaking, a cloud based solution is more standardised than an on-premise solution, but with the flexibility of Altitude Script Language, as well as a database driven interface, the vast majority of requirements can be customised.

Our cloud solution also has more out-of-the-box functionality ready to be used from day one, than an on-premise solution normally has.

The functionality is exactly the same, just where it is stored is different. It is easier to access and changes can be made more rapidly.

Leading cloud-based contact center software vendors have developed their products over nearly a decade, and offer most or all of the features found in on-premise systems. And, since the products are typically developed for the cloud, they often provide unified administration, seamless inbound/outbound blending, integrated IVR and ACD, unified contact history, and similar "unified" features that are less common with premise-based infrastructure that evolved over decades, often through company acquisitions.

It’s almost one-for-one. Functionality is rarely an inhibitor, especially if the cloud service is based on a market-leading contact center platform that has thousands of customers running their operation on it. There is a great discussion on this topic in a white paper Donna Fluss of DMG wrote called “Hosted Contact Center Solutions – Setting the Record Straight.” Here’s the link: http://www.inin.com/resources/Documents/Hosted-Contact-Center-Solutions.pdf

Cloud-based functionality has significantly narrowed the gap with on-premise systems over the past couple of years. In some cases cloud-based advantages are found through increased efficiencies by operating in the cloud like seamless integration and very flexible scalability.

http://www.inin.com/resources/Documents/Hosted-Contact-Center-Solutions.pdf




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Since its inception more than 15 years ago, hosted contact centre services were primarily tailored for Small-to-Medium Businesses (SMBs), offering scaled-down features in exchange for convenience and low cost-of-entry. The earliest hosted offerings were based on rudimentary automatic call distribution (ACD) functionality that gave companies basic call queuing and routing capabilities. Small organisations looking to avoid IT staffing and avoid the overhead of a premise-based platform opted for such systems, understanding that they would receive sub-standard (but serviceable) functionality. A major challenge for early adopters was the tremendous problem that came with migration to a premise-based system as businesses grew or services expanded. Costly and fraught with delay, migration horror stories further defined hosted offerings as stop-gap solutions designed only for small organisations.

Today, organisations like Noble Systems offer an alternative to traditional premise-based systems, delivering a complete contact centre technology solution with all of the advantages of a cloud-based CaaS (communications as a service) infrastructure, giving you the full functionality of our proven premise-based Enterprise platform in a hosted environment.

While many vendors offer limited functionality in their CaaS products, with some of the leading providers, you get all of the power and performance of their Enterprise Solution in a unified platform, with an integrated management console for a single-point of entry to advanced features and management tools. Whilst Noble’s ‘right-sizing’ capabilities provide the best fit for smaller companies, the wide range of sophisticated features and functionality make them ideal for large enterprise organisations. You should achieve maximum productivity with outbound dialling, inbound ACD, blending, skills-based routing, IVR, call recording, agent and system monitoring, customisable agent workstations, workforce management (WFM), legislative compliance, results reporting, CRM/collection software integration, and more.

In theory, there is nothing a CPE solution can offer that can’t be replicated by a Cloud solution. Whether that is true in practice depends on the maturity of the Cloud solution.

However, there are functions and services that Cloud solutions can offer that can’t be replicated by CPE solutions. Cloud vendors such as Ultra, for example, provide real-time performance monitoring services – while most CPE solution vendors treat performance management as an historic (e.g. end-of-day) exercise. They can also typically deploy new functions and campaigns much quicker than CPE vendors. And they can bring advanced services such as speech recognition and follow-me services within the reach of organisations that couldn’t otherwise afford them due to their flexible pay-as-you-use payment models.



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4. "Is it best to wait until we can move everything to the cloud, or do it piecemeal?"

Vendor Response

This is very much depending on the type of operations that you have. From a cost perspective it only makes a minor difference, but from a practical operational perspective it has many benefits to migrate in small steps – it allows the users to build confidence in the cloud solution, and to become comfortable with the new system, and it also allows for calibration and customisation to be done during the migration period.

• Take the plunge – The immediate results from cloud are vast – its business agile opening up new strategies for multichannel and entering into new markets with actionable information at your fingertips

• Trial new markets/ channels - A number of our customers are using customers to trial new projects, product etc.. so you are reducing the risk

Most companies take a pragmatic, incremental approach when moving to the cloud – either by department, for new campaigns, or for new clients (for outsourcers). This approach helps mitigate against disruptive change, and helps establish a template for success that can be repeated throughout the organization.

That really depends on your existing environment and preferences. Ultimately you will want to get to a single, all-in-one solution in the cloud. However, you may want to wait to replace certain systems or applications until they are fully-depreciated.

Here is a great research paper Frost and Sullivan wrote on the topic you may want to look at: http://www.inin.com/resources/Documents/Cloud-Contact-Center-Market-Trends-Movement-from-Best-of-Breed-to-Suites.pdf.

The cloud option allows you to the flexibility move at your own pace, either all at once or piecemeal. LiveOps offers an a la carte menu of Contact Center Applications so you can select the pieces you want and implement them in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the cost of on-premise systems.

http://www.inin.com/resources/Documents/Cloud-Contact-Center-Market-Trends-Movement-from-Best-of-Breed-to-Suites.pdf

http://www.inin.com/resources/Documents/Cloud-Contact-Center-Market-Trends-Movement-from-Best-of-Breed-to-Suites.pdf




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Most customers move to the cloud application by application. It is very important to ensure that there is a long term strategy where the cloud vendors interoperate with each other and with any on-premise applications where necessary.

The great benefit of moving to Cloud Contact Centre is this can be "layered" over an existing on premise PBX thereby providing a no risk migration strategy and giving all the benefits of Cloud while protecting any outstanding investment or asset value.

Noble Systems believes that the hosted-to-premise migration should be as seamless and painless as possible. A variety of needs and variables may arise to make such a change advantageous, but many companies realise this only to discover that it will be cost-prohibitive, disruptive to customer care, lengthy, or all of the above. Noble has introduced a Hybrid solution to enable our customers to ‘try out’ the hosted offering with the following solutions:

• Noble Cloud EC is an evolutionary solution that allows you to instantly access broader bandwidth to expand your contact centre capacity on demand, wherever your agents are located. Featuring our ‘elastic capacity' architecture, the Cloud EC platform provides a hybrid CPE (customer premise equipment) and CaaS environment that breaks down traditional barriers to support volume spikes, peak periods, new programs, work-from-home agents, etc, and to help you grow your business

• Noble Messenger EC gives you instant access to broader bandwidth for your expanded broadcast messaging campaigns. Messenger EC works with your existing Noble Messenger solution platform. With Messenger EC, you can expand your capacity when you need it, with fast on-demand deployment, without requiring you to buy or maintain new equipment or increase total lines to support your periodic volume increases and eliminating the need and expense for third-party messaging services. Noble provides the line capacity via our secure hosted messaging environment.

Because Cloud services can be easily overlaid onto existing infrastructure, they can be deployed at a pace that suits the organisation in question. If a new function such as ACD, voice portal or dialler is required, for example, Cloud solutions can typically be deployed at short notice and with little disruption to existing infrastructure. Very little integration work is generally required and connection requirements are minimal. In the case of Ultra services, all that is required is a standard Internet browser and a standard PSTN telephone (or softphone).




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5. "We have concerns that integrating with our CRM, back office systems and bespoke applications may be very difficult."

Vendor Response

Our experience is that integration isn’t very difficult. Our platform is flexible and we have numerous ways of integrating – by transferring data periodically in data batches, by performing real-time communication on the server side, or by actioning real-time requests from the workstation. Of course there is a dependency on the CRM system (or another existing system) to allow for integration in one way or another.

Much of the integration required in legacy call centres is unnecessary with Cloud based contact centres. Integration is easy being software based and Enghouse Interactive has powerful API connectors to leading 3rd party CRM systems/ applications capable of multiple integrations and multiple screen-pops.

Often, integration with cloud-based solutions is easier than with on-premise technology, since cloud solutions typically offer robust and easy to use APIs based on contemporary technology such as web services and REST.

Assuming you are dealing with a market leading contact centre provider, that should not be an issue. Integration with CRM and backend systems is considered standard for cloud contact centre deployments. However, do your due diligence during the evaluation process to ensure there won’t be any surprises.

The success of a call center project often hinges upon successful integration with agent desktop applications, back-office applications, and enterprise data sources. LiveOps has developed a rich infrastructure supporting integration during all phases of a call, from initial caller segmentation through call delivery and presentation at the desktop. Further, LiveOps has the technology and experience to support integration with the breadth of modern and legacy enterprise technologies found in many large call centers.

The platform's integration infrastructure is designed for extensibility beyond any single integration. Many of our customers require routing based on data extracted directly from an enterprise data source, or interaction with a custom web service or Java API. LiveOps has built an integration infrastructure that allows rapid integration with any web service, data source, or native API required by a given call center implementation.




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It is true that integration between a cloud platform and back end (on premise) systems can be challenging, therefore it is important to deploy a strategy that keeps data in the most suitable locations and can be linked through the use of unique identifiers.

For example. An incoming caller can be identified through use of CLI or capturing an account code, and can be given dynamic routing treatment or self service functions through a web service layer (between the back end system and the cloud based contact centre). Of course this does usually require some software development unless you go for a strategy to move your CRM data into a platform that has native integration into the Contact Centre.

The key thing is to try to avoid any complex CTI integration based on client/server proprietary protocols and use web based interfaces to transfer the CTI data between Contact Centre components to CRM components.

With Noble Systems there are a number of ways that we can share data with other systems. There is an agent API that can be used to integrate with your systems and there are web services that will work with the IVR. We also have the ability to move data back and forth by sending data to the secure FTP and uploading and exporting as necessary. Noble Systems’ experience of premise based integration to CRM and back office systems is equally applicable in a cloud based environment.

Through open, standards-based architectures and APIs, Cloud platforms can integrate simply and effectively to a broad range of popular CRM, speech analytics and back office platforms. Ultra is yet to find a package that we are unable to integrate with and has several clients who have undertaken deep integration. One client, for example, has embedded our call control component in its CRM system; while another uploads its customer contact records to our cloud to create a more integrated service with unified reporting.




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6. "What happens to our IT department? Have you found that it is cut?"

Vendor Response

The need for internal IT resource to manage the contact centre platform is much lower, or even eliminated, once the business has migrated to the cloud platform. This may mean that the IT department is cut, or it may mean that the internal IT department is re-focused to work with other more productive tasks.

IT resource is redeployed, not removed– it reduces the resource needed to manage within public cloud environments. However a number of our customers IT personnel have welcome this – it has enabled them to be used elsewhere to help develop new strategies or concentrate on key areas of improvements across the business.

IT resources are rarely reduced as a result of deploying cloud-based technology. Rather, it enables an IT department to focus on more value-added services for business users – integration with internal systems, enhanced reporting capabilities, other projects, etc.

That is a great question. While it is certainly an option, most companies we speak to don’t end up reducing headcount when moving to the cloud, but rather re-focus resources to address more strategic imperatives or initiatives that have not been able to be addressed due to a lack of resources.

In many cases an existing IT department is retooled to support a variety of new functions supporting the cloud instance. In most cases IT departments are not cut, just repurposed but the many of them do shrink in size due to taking on a less expansive role in maintenance, etc.

When deploying hosted, whether to cut the IT department is dependent on the goals of the organisation. Various Noble Systems clients have put different strategies in place and some have even changed their original plans. Most clients have understaffed IT departments due to increased workload and implementing a hosted solution has freed them up to work on other projects. Some Noble clients have restructured their IT departments to have fewer full-time employees and use consultants for any network/firewall, PBX or PC issues.




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Many organisations use Cloud specialists to create new strategies to improve quality and productivity and spot problems rather than employ in-house managers and analysts to carry out these tasks. Other organisations choose to supplement their in-house teams with Cloud infrastructure, operational and telephony specialists.


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7. "Does cloud make it any easier to implement virtual contact centres or multimedia / social media? If so, how?"

Vendor Response

Yes. In our cloud solution, deploying a virtual contact centre is very similar to any other deployment. As soon as the site – or even an individual user – is securely connected to the platform there is no difference between a single- and multiple-site operation. Multimedia channels including social media are available in Altitude uCI, which is the platform for our cloud offering.

Yes, a number of our customers use cloud to try new media channel and/ or integration with social media – With full visibility and reporting across and entire operations and channels, with everything measured so allowing future informed decisions on channel strategy.

Cloud-based contact center software is clearly an enabling technology for virtual contact centers. Since there's no hardware or software to install and maintain, users can be located anywhere in the world – all they need is a workstation, USB headset, and high-speed internet connection. Since all users are served via the cloud, daily operations for a virtual contact center are usually dramatically easier – e.g., supervisors can view their team or all agents regardless of location.

A Cloud Contact Centre is ideal for providing a true unified and global contact centre because the functionality is located centrally, away from one particular site. This enables the following advanced features to be deployed elegantly without complex and potentially unreliable call flows whilst minimising single points of failure;

• Efficient call handling through use of network queues which look for agent status across multiple locations before routing a call

• Calls queued within the Cloud, allowing for a virtually unlimited numbers of incoming calls

• Calls held in the cloud until an agent becomes free, reducing the number of lost calls

• Follow the sun routing capability allows the first point of contact to travel around the world within the working day

• Intelligent routing plans such as skills based routing which prioritises agents based on training – whatever their location

• Rich management information available real-time and historically from anywhere in the world





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It certainly can as the cloud makes it easy to turn up these types of services. Technology is no longer the gating factor – it’s a question of how ready your business is from an organisational and process perspective. Certain cloud providers have industry leading consultants available to help you answer those questions and put best practices in place to ensure a successful deployment.

The cloud contact center IS the virtual contact center so for these purposes they are one in the same. Both Social Media and multimedia are seamlessly integrated in the cloud via open API’s. LiveOps recently released our new Social Application, which is fully integrated with Facebook and Twitter, providing real time social feeds into the agent’s dashboard for immediate review and response.

The answer is a 100% yes. Typically a cloud based contact centre is the central location where all calls, emails etc are delivered to. Therefore distribution of calls to any sites can be achieved simply by knowing the phone number or browser where the agent is located. Once it has been established what skill is required for the call or other media type then it doesn't matter where the agent is located as long as a phone and network path exists to send the contact.

One of the advantages of the cloud is the increased ease for implementing virtual contact centres. Clients can add remote agents or additional contact centres in just days or weeks depending on their planning and execution. In the cloud, rather than waiting to install new hardware, clients simply purchase additional lines and/or agents, which can be quickly ‘turned on’, and the agent can be set up, trained and off and running.

Social Media is a rapidly growing communications channel for consumers. Forums and communities offer a quick and accessible way for customers to share their opinions and experiences, including their complaints or displeasure. Managing this new resource for customer contacts is increasingly important in today’s on-demand culture. Noble® Social Media enables you to integrate social networking into your overall customer communications strategies, allowing you to create a responsive program within your contact centre and to expand the reach of your customer service programs. This implementation of social media within the contact centre would be the same on a hosted or premise based solution.

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The distributed nature of Cloud technology – with servers typically replicated in multiple telecom buildings and connected to multiple Telcos and Internet Service Providers – means it’s as easy to support advisors working from a remote office as it is those working in a traditional contact centre. Clients can easily set up virtual multi-site contact centre operations with powerful virtual call routing, centralised management control (ensuring closer adherence to industry regulations such as FSA) and all advisors logged into a particular campaign following identical call flow scripts.

The distributed nature of Cloud technology also more readily enables ‘one number contactability’ services where users state where they are working from on a particular day and the Cloud service will find them – in the office, at home, or in a remote office. When people are not available to take calls, business rules can be set to direct incoming calls to colleagues or to a support desk. This avoids the need for advisors to put different phone numbers into contact centre systems depending on where they are working from on a particular day.

Another advantage of Cloud services is that connectivity is very simple. In the case of Ultra, advisors require only a standard telephone (DDI, landline or mobile), an Internet connection and an ActiveX component to log into Ultra’s Cloud platform.


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8. "Do you require any software to be downloaded to the agent desktop? If not, how do you guarantee the speed of a browser-based solution, especially in a scripted conversation which requires immediate processing?"

Vendor Response

We either require Altitude uAgent Windows to be installed on the agent desktop, or can offer Citrix/RDP desktops which minimise desktop management. The installation files are easy to download from our web portal or via a dedicated FTP server. Voice can be delivered via embedded softphone or a physical IP phone.

There are a number of different flavours of the software from web-based interface to thick clients on the desktop. The quality or connection to the agent desktop is required to ensure fast and immediate reaction of input and response when using agent scripting tools. As we already deliver our voice path over IP, we do normally not have any issues in this area.

Agent desktop requirements vary by solution. With Five9, the standard agent application is based on Java technology, and is downloaded and installed securely via the web. The Five9 application also provides several features that provide immediate information to agents when a call arrives, such as a call preview window that includes essential information about the contact and the phone call.

Interaction Scripter Client requires a download.

We do NOT require any native software to be downloaded to the agent desktop to use our solution. By leveraging a modular, multi-tenant architecture and Web- based delivery model, the LiveOps on-demand solutions enable organizations to rapidly deploy, configure, and maintain business applications — and empower business users to take control of their software assets.




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Some cloud based Contact Centre platforms will require a download, but the superior ones will just use a standard internet browser therefore speed is not an issue. Scripting tools can still be browser based and not require any download. Speed issues can occur as a result of poor internet links, if deploying cloud solutions it is good practice to ensure the supplier can run some quality of service testing with you to ensure the Contact Centre network traffic is routed for optimum performance.

The Noble Systems Cloud Agent uses a browser to run the contact centre desktop, no ‘footprint’ is required on the desktop. We recommend that clients run with a MPLS solution so that the data and voice have a direct path back to the solution for high speed processing.

To use Ultra Cloud services, advisors must either download the Ultra Callbar, use a third party call control app, or run a bespoke call control app on their desktop. Either way, yes, software does need to be loaded and run on the advisor desktop.




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9. "We’ve heard of community clouds, where the cost and resources are shared between several companies. How is this organised? Do we have to find our partners ourselves?"

Vendor Response

We can offer both cloud based services (where a number of clients share the same platform) or private hosted services, where we host and manage infrastructure dedicated to a specific client. We offer our cloud solution as a complete platform – including software, hardware, management, support and telephony – ready to ”plug-and-play.”

Enghouse Interactive recognises that this is the best solution for multiple companies or mergers we have the capability and partners available to deliver this today.

One of the inherent benefits of the cloud model is the ability to share resources across multiple companies. Cloud Services Brokerage is an interesting emerging trend where third parties (or internal IT organisations for large entities) help simplify deployment and management of multiple cloud services on behalf of multiple companies. If you’re interested in learning more, check out this blog post on the topic.

We have not implemented any community clouds at this point but the option is available. The details on how this would be organized would need to be discussed with our Operations Department.

True cloud providers will be sharing the same technology infrastructure across multiple customers and therefore the ability exists to reduce costs to serve as a core benefit.

Noble Systems defines a community cloud infrastructure as provisioned for exclusive use by a specific community of consumers from organisations that have shared concerns (e.g. mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations). Currently, we are not focused on a community cloud, but if a community of organised partners came together looking for a shared environment, we would certainly look at the business requirements and create a solution that could work for both organisations.





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