Today’s connected, digitally-savvy customers place enormous pressure on businesses to change and adapt their methods of contact. It’s a significant change with an impact across all industries and telephony and contact centre services are no exception.
Hosted telephony and hosted contact centre services give enterprises the edge they need to deliver the best service at a reduced cost. With hosted telephony, there's no need for an in-house PBX or physical phone lines to be implemented - the hardware you'd usually need is hosted by your service provider.
Taking the idea further, a hosted contact centre is a full customer experience service. All your inbound, outbound and self-service customer interactions are hosted on your service provider’s back-office systems.
But how can these two intertwined technologies help enterprises and contact centres? What are the unique benefits that are driving the adoption of hosted telephony and hosted contact centre services? Here are six key advantages to making the switch:
1. Quick and easy deployment
Choosing a hosted service gives you everything you’d expect from an in-house service, with the added advantage of your provider’s expertise and ready-to-use infrastructure.
With a hosted service, you can start supporting new channels immediately without the need for added infrastructure. Everything's ready to use and you can get started whenever you’re ready.
2. Easier maintenance and ongoing support
With a hosted service, the issues of management, maintenance, and updates to your telephony and contact centre systems are the responsibility of your service provider. Whenever you need support, you’re able to turn to your provider for help at no extra cost.
3. Flexible enough to cope with change
With less emphasis on your own hardware and physical lines, a hosted service gives you the freedom to scale up and down as you need to. You can add new seats at short notice as well as reducing your capacity if you find yourself paying for lines you're not using.
Anticipating and planning for changing customer demands isn't an exact science. It’s not always possible to predict spikes in your inbound calls or avoid waste when things are quieter. The flexibility that a hosted service gives you is invaluable.
4. Get the latest innovations without capital investment
Contact centre technology moves fast, particularly during this turbulent period where customer expectations are shifting. If you invest in your own in-house hardware, it’s impossible to replace your infrastructure every 12-24 months as new technology become available.
A good hosted contact centre provider will constantly evaluate their service and update it to offer the latest features. Without the commitment and long-term investment in hardware, you’re free to take advantage of every new advancement as soon as it becomes available.
5. Lower total cost of ownership
Switching to a hosted service doesn’t just move your costs from CAPEX to OPEX. In fact, your total cost of ownership will be considerably lower than an in-house system.
This is perhaps the most compelling advantage of hosted solutions. As well as avoiding a large initial outlay into hardware with a limited lifespan, you'll be able to avoid further costs including infrastructure, management, configuration and in-house support.
6. Improve your contact centre security
Finally, the issue of security is a fundamentally misunderstood aspect of hosted services. While some business owners assume that hosting and transferring data off-site to your service provider increases your exposure, there’s a good chance that a hosted service could reduce your risk.
The right service providers will have a focus on security - implementing robust firewalls, encryption, and enterprise-grade protection. With numerous customers to protect, this will typically go above and beyond your own in-house IT security measures, giving you complete peace of mind that your data is safe. Some will even provide dedicated servers for you, a more secure alternative to the commonly used multi-tenant platforms.
From reduced costs to unparalleled flexibility, hosted contact centre services give enterprises new capabilities that in-house hardware simply can’t achieve.
Find out more about Hostcomm secure hosted contact centre and telephony for enterprises. Call 0808 168 4400 today .