The arguments in favour of moving contact centre solutions to the cloud are well worn and well understood. Pay as you go models mean businesses can move to an opex rather than capex model.
It’s flexible, so businesses can quickly scale their computing power up or down when necessary. Increased collaboration, better disaster recovery and the ability for employees to work flexibly mean that, more and more, cloud computing is the first choice for most businesses.
This trend was confirmed by recent independent research commissioned by Genesys, which surveyed businesses using contact centres, with 55% of respondents stating that their entire contact centre functionality would be cloud based by 2020.
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This trend is hardly surprising, given the array of advantages that the cloud offers. However, above and beyond the common reasons listed above, there are other less understood reasons for making the switch. Here are 5 more reasons why you should consider moving to the cloud.
Rent costs
For many businesses, office rental is one of the biggest cost centres. With cloud computing, businesses can be flexible if a more suitable site location comes up, as they don’t have the hassle of a complicated and costly IT move, as well as the upheaval and downtime associated with moving servers and other hardware to another location.
What’s more, because cloud computing also supports home working, businesses need only rent the amount of space they need on an average day. Rather than having desks for every employee, which often leads to large amounts of unused office space, staff can hot desk. This can mean huge savings on rent. Smaller office space can also mean lower council rates.
Seasonal fluctuations
Businesses that experience seasonal fluctuations need to hire more staff at peak times. In the past, business would have to purchase enough software licenses and bandwidth to cover these peaks, despite the fact that this extra capacity would not have been used for the remainder of the year. Cloud lets users scale up quickly and easily with pay as you go licenses.
the average annual cost in electricity of running an on-site server for a small business is around $750
Utility bills
One hidden cost of on-site servers is the electricity bills. It not only takes a huge amount of electricity to run the servers, but they also need to be cooled to prevent overheating and failure. The warm air servers produce also means the temperature in the office has to be cooled, further adding to utility bills. Finally, servers also require constant management, with more machines running to service this management.
A couple of years ago, Teena Hammond of ZDNet estimated that the average annual cost in electricity of running an on-site server for a small business was around $750.
Telecoms bills
In contact centres, call queueing at the network level can be expensive. Where contact centre operations have more than one site, calls can be queued at the network level if there are no agents available to take it. Once someone becomes available, the call can then be passed to the agent in one of the contact centres. This can make for significant savings on telephone bills.
IT management costs
Cloud computing means that on site implementation costs and associated IT maintenance salaries are eliminated. What’s more, ongoing IT maintenance is no longer needed at every site when hardware is removed.
For multisite operations, the cloud offers the opportunity to install a single cross-site management team in place, with call routing and self-service controlled at a single point, which, in turn, reduces management costs and increases the available labour pool.
cloud is fast becoming the only option for forward-thinking contact centre businesses
Cloud computing is becoming a popular choice among IT decision makers in contact centre businesses. While many benefits such as cost, flexibility and better collaboration are some of the benefits that are already well understood, there’s a wide range of less understood advantages, including reduced rent and utility bills, and reductions in IT management costs. This means that cloud is fast becoming the only option for forward-thinking contact centre businesses.
You can find more insights on cloud computing and the contact centre in the recent Contact Babel research The Inner Circle Guide to Cloud-Based Contact Centre Solutions.
Keith Wilkinson is VP Cloud EMEA at Genesys, the market leader in omnichannel customer experience and contact centre solutions.
Keith has worked at Genesys for 13 years, moving from Sales Director to VP and General Manager UK and Ireland, to VP UK, Ireland and Southeast Africa, before heading up Cloud in EMEA.
Keith holds a Bsc in Computer Science from The University of Kingston.