Apr 11th, 2011

Any CIO worth their salt is investigating software as a service (SaaS). In the contact centre industry, the opex spend model which a hosted solution offers is appealing, especially given that contact centre owners are faced with a future where interactions will increasingly take place via multiple channels and customers’ expectations in terms of service quality and speed are becoming more sophisticated and demanding. But is it as simple as buying your contact centre seats at the end of a network point, with your service provider harbouring the technology platform? That, after all, is what is being sold.

The challenge, suggests Paul Fick of Spescom DataFusion, is that ‘hosted’ today means something very different from the outsourced data centre offering of the past. “Accessed from within the cloud, hosted services are today not just hosted applications residing on the vendor’s hardware and accessed by the organisation via the Web or via a dedicated pipe hardwired into the business. Instead, businesses expect an integrated, tailored service. This may comprise a myriad of applications linked together and accessed seamlessly whenever necessary.”

“Thus, it’s not just the equipment they want; it’s the service on top of it – the intelligent, value-adding business solution. a ‘solution as a service’ if you will.  Organisations are questioning whether solution providers in South Africa, given network and other constraints, are capable of offering that kind of hosted service.”

An example of such a service in the contact centre arena would be a full front- and back office solution remotely provisioned to the call centre operation in a pay-as-you-go model. The solution would of course be flexible and scalable. However, it would also offer a catalogue or bouquet of additional value add services that the company can select from, including connectivity consulting, last mile provisioning, data custom reporting, Business Intelligence and Management Information Systems (MIS) input.

Leveraging the knowledge and expertise on offer by a specialist solutions as a service provider, far beyond just the technology platform, is what businesses require – especially those looking for competitive differentiation.

“And to take it that one step further, if the hosted service provider has sufficient insight into the industry and into your business – for example, the 30-year insight Spescom DataFusion has into the contact centre and enterprise telephony arena – it can tailor the service to your unique needs, which would be adding immense value.”

Of course, the hosted contact centre and telephony model is not suited to all organisations, for example given high levels of current investment in infrastructure. But there are very few CIO’s that would venture a strategy that excludes solutions as a service from their future roadmap. It is happening now on all levels in the organisational hierarchy.

“Many businesses don’t want to own enterprise hardware and software because they consider it non-core to their business. They would be quite happy with iron-clad SLAs and large ata pipes into their operations – if they could find a hosted offering with the right value proposition,” says Fick.

“Hosted solutions are in the process of becoming mainstream, especially in the lower end of the contact centre market where factors like flexibility and off-balance sheet operational costs are attractive. The uptake of these services will grow exponentially in the coming months, and this will not be limited to smaller organisations.

Contact centres and other organisations will have to be very selective in terms of whom they choose as a hosted provider. The leader will emerge as a solution as a service provider that understands the importance of holistic service differentiation, capable of delivering value added business services on an ongoing basis. That is, more than just a hosted platform.