Telax sat down with Richard Wagg, contact center strategist par excellence, to get his thoughts on the move from traditional call center mindsets to cloud-based solutions. Here is part one of that very interesting meeting.
What do you consider a traditional call center mindset?
Traditionally, call center thinking has been very linear. The call comes in, you transfer it to a warm body using standard ACD queues and basic IVRs. There was some progress in the 90s: companies began to take a smarter approach to call routing. But there is still a lot of traditional thinking in place. The inbound call center is historically little more than a cost center and many companies have not moved away from that way of thinking.
Is the move from traditional call centers to cloud-based solutions inevitable?
Yes, I think the trend is going that way. I’ve worked with companies that had a traditional call center and the challenge was that the company was not willing to invest the capital required to keep the solution current. It’s not cheap to have the right solutions.
I like to think of it in terms of core competencies. You look at a company like Telax, for instance, and their core competency is call center solutions, pure and simple. For a company that’s producing license plates or selling mutual funds, does it make sense to invest in in-house call center expertise? Training is incredibly time consuming and expensive. It comes down to a business decision. Companies are apt to migrate because the hosted solutions available are getting better and better and reproducing comparable solutions in-house is becoming increasingly expensive.
What are the major challenges of migrating from a traditional to a cloud-based solution?
I think that the biggest challenge is making the decision itself. Some companies have invested significantly in PBX technology or other in-house infrastructure. There is a hesitation to go down the hosted path because of a pressure to get your money’s worth out of past decisions. A stakeholder involved in the decision may have gone to senior management and justified a major expense several years ago. In some cases, people don’t want to ask the tough questions. The business decision is definitely the most difficult part because it often requires admitting error.
Is it possible for companies to do a partial migration to a hosted solution?
Yes, although customization can be very costly. There are a number of components to a call center. If you invested significantly in a PBX and an in-house call recording solution, you may not need to outsource those elements. But every time you want to integrate a hosted piece with an in-house piece, more customization is going to be required.
I remember a situation where we had an IVR application that was done through a CTI app. At the time, we didn’t want in-house changes, we wanted to outsource them. We needed to make a change in an IVR menu, something very simple, and the cost was over $50,000. Now that’s an extreme example, but the point is that customization can be prohibitively costly. Needless to say, we didn’t move forward.
With a company like Telax, they’ll often reuse elements of development requested by their clients. So you’re likely not shouldering the entire cost alone, it’s being shared among numerous organizations. There are also licensing costs to consider. Does it make sense in the long run to keep some elements in-house? Not in my opinion. But there may be a business case for making a slower transition to a hosted solution.
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Richard Wagg is a Toronto-based contact center strategist who has spent the past 14 years supporting contact center operations and technologies in the financial services sector. He has worked extensively with big banks and mutual fund companies to improve efficiency by implementing new contact center platforms. More recently, Richard has focussed on technologies as they relate to contact center business models. He strives daily to push contact centre towards a much more open, cost effective and dynamic environment than was previously thought possible.