We, at Hostcomm, are really happy to announce that we have expanded our AWS partnership to offer AWS hosting across our full product range, including our Cloud-Based Dialler.
Over the last 15 years, Hostcomm has built up its robust hosting and network infrastructure, establishing a reputation as one of the leading providers of hosted contact centre services in the UK. However, we have always been looking for ways to provide additional support to their customers and possible room for improvement; for example, we have expanded our range of products to all aspects of digital transformation and looked to better address changing capacity requirements of larger customers with global requirements.
About three years ago, we started to use AWS for our chatbot and live chat products and, happy with the results, started thoroughly evaluating performance possibilities for all our solutions.
Last year, the challenges brought about by the COVID pandemic persuaded us to ensure we could offer AWS for all of our hosted contact centre and collaboration software solutions as soon as possible.
Speed of deployment
When businesses across the country had to move to remote working, many of the ones with on-premises solutions - while they waited for their systems to be migrated over to the cloud – were left struggling to provide call and contact centre service to their customers.
At the time, we could successfully complete deployment and migration in three days, but we wanted to find a way to speed that process up, ensure that the switch over could become almost seamless, and to minimize disruption to a customer’s business. Hostcomm set up a specialized AWS test and development server and, through rigorous fine-tuning of our build and image creation process, improved the time we can finish a deployment, bringing it down to around 30 minutes to achieve our goal around migration and business continuance.
Improved performance
The move to remote working has meant an increase in the use of hosted solutions, greater demand on global hosting infrastructure, and the increased mission-critical importance of online tools, such as for communication and collaboration, for the running of businesses. Using AWS, with its 99.99% uptime, which equates to only 5 mins of downline per year, and high-speed global network means Hostcomm can provide our customers with an additional level of reliability, speed, international coverage and performance to ensure their business and customer services teams can work as optimally as possible. For those customers who have made the move to AWS, they have seen increased call quality, less dropped calls, better customer engagement and increased sales.
Scalability
In the last year, we have started to see unusual patterns of demand from consumers for call centre services and, as a consequence, more volatile demand on broadband and server requirements. Amazon EC2 offers a solution in this area by monitoring to detect if you start running out of storage and bandwidth, and then, based on parameters that you’ve set, quickly and automatically increasing the service. It has the added benefit that if a client has a large number of new employees starting, they can be added quickly to the system.
Security
Finally, with face-to-face payments not encouraged, there has been an uptake in the need for call centre staff to take phone payments. We, at Hostcomm, are a PCI-DSS Level 1 payment provider enabling us to offer these services. AWS is also Level 1 PCI-DSS credited, so it meets our level of security.
Conclusion
Moving forward, Hostcomm will continue to provide and strengthen its network services but now complements that with a commercially tested AWS hosting option. By doing so, we hope to maintain our reputation for reliability, service and connection quality. New clients can choose between these options, while our existing clients if they are experiencing call quality issues, can move to AWS.
