The Business Case for Hosted Contact Centres

Introduction
the cost/benefits vary according to the size of your contact centre, but we are attractive to large corporate centres with international operations, SME operations with only 10 agents, and all points in between.

Do you have a 200 seat call centre and need to save £100,000 or more in the next year? Easy! We could perhaps help you save that amount in the next month! One of our customers, with 400 agents, expects to save around £3,000,000 over the coming three years...all without compromising customer service in any way, and without any capital expenditure at all.

Perhaps you may have a 1000+ agent operation working in multiple sites around the world? Then just extrapolate most of the figures below and then call us, because we've got even more benefits we'd like to discuss with you - including how to enhance your existing operation without throwing out everything and starting again from scratch.

The financial case at a glance...

Let's assume a new 200 seat centre, just to assign real numbers to the case.

• CapEx savings of £100,000 or more - there's no telephony hardware (ACD switches etc) to purchase with us. All you need are the telephones for your agents and a PC to connect to the internet: things you need to buy anyway
• CapEx savings of £50,000 - there's no need to buy call recording hardware - these fabulously expensive devices are a thing of the past with us
• Savings of £20,000 for CTI and other software purchases - there's no software to buy either
• Savings of 15%-20% of hardware/software maintenance costs (they're always based on list price, let's say, £30,000). Our prices inherently include maintenance and support because, in effect, you are outsourcing the management of the technology to us
• Savings of £30,000 on hardware upgrades - there's probably a law that states whatever what you buy will be obsoleted soon after installation. In any case, after 4 years your hardware will inevitably go 'End-of-Life' and you'll have to start again all over. Not with us, it's our responsibility to keep our system competitive because our business depends on it.
• Eliminate £40,000 system integrator costs - you don't need them with our solution. Everything is homogenous (we provide everything you need) and pre-integrated anyway, so everything is quick to set up and commission. Except possibly for integration with your back office, and we make that as easy as possible, you won't need long planning meetings and months of development work (our go-live record is the same day). Let's cut out half a man year, and that's being generous
• Eliminate the 'hidden' costs associated with housing and running all of the above - the proverbial iceberg comes to mind!
• Reduce the number of agents you need by 5-10 people by intelligent call routing - we'll need to explain this in a meeting, but it's true
• Increase revenues by value-based routing, you could boost sales by £100,000 in year one. It may sound against the First Law of Call Centres (all calls should be answered and 90% within 20 seconds) - but there are times when it's vital to let certain callers abandon the call... (Visit the link, it opens in a new up window).
• Increase revenues by 6% by targetted advertising while callers are in-queue . If you have callers that a high spenders we can treat them in special ways. Unlike our rivals who to charge at least double the basic software costs, our service comes at only a small extra price. (visit individual caller treatment)
• Be more business agile - with us your people, even non-technical folks, can make changes to the system in a matter of minutes. The financial gains are intangible, but it allows you to adapt to changing events in your market on a daily basis if need be.
• Saving the costs of preparing for a disaster (not necessarily the headline grabbing things which will probably never happen, but things like loss of power, floods that block off access to your site, the occasional major hardware upgrade...) We can switch your agents to working from home in under a minute.

There's more, a lot more, such as PCI-DSS compliant services and Speech Analytics... But let's move on.

Introducing the Hosted Contact Centre
How can we do all of the above? We have developed and now lead the European market in a technology called a 'Hosted Contact Centre'. Based on the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model, it eliminates the need for companies like yours to buy, install, commission and maintain your call centre hardware and software systems. Instead, in effect, you outsource the technology and any support worries to us and we take care of routing the calls between your customers and your agents - wherever they may be. It's still your agents taking the calls, just more effectively and efficiently than before. And you have operational control of your call plans - in fact, your people can makes changes in minutes from anywhere in the world using a web-browser. You then just pay us for the number of agents that actually use the system every month.

Our business model

• A small set up charge which includes provisioning (porting your existing telephone numbers) and one or two days training
• Monthly billing based on actual usage of the system - no paying for overcapacity that you may need 'just in case'
• No other costs (except for VAT). No maintenance charges, no support costs, no spare parts, no system upgrade costs, no standby staff, no accommodation...
• You can use us for a long or as short as needed, and scale the number or agents and/or functionality you need up and down yourself
• You can even have a free trial to validate the service   

Don't worry that you will be sacrificing performance by using a Hosted Contact Centre solution in any way. Far from it! We use telco networks such as Cable & Wireless to provide the highest quality service (we can deliver using VoIP too). Because many customers share our platform we can afford to make it far more powerful than you'd probably want to buy for yourself in isolation. For example, just one of our nodes can cope with 10,000 simultaneous calls and still perform advanced CTI-based call routing based on customer intelligence (not just screen-pops!) make call recordings, run PCI-DSS compliant IVRs that take credit card payments in total security...

Just like salesforce.com has transformed the world of CRM, and GoogleApps attacks the cosy Microsoft Office stranglehold, NewVoiceMedia is changing the way contact centres operate and are financed.

If you have read down this point you are probably becoming interested in our solution: why not call us on 0800 280 2888 to discuss your needs with a specialist? In the meantime you can read more by downloading an eight page pdf that shows 28 ways you can save costs and still improve contact centre performance. Click here.