If you remember the old Burger King ad campaign “Have It Your Way...” then a) you’re probably a bit older than you’d like to admit, and b) you understand what LiveVox officials mean when they say on their company blog that “the market has developed a lot of flavors of cloud -- public, private, hybrid, etc.”
And you also understand when they say that hey, in fast food joints, all flashy advertising aside, “your food doesn’t always look as fresh as the picture behind the register, and a lot of ends up tasting the same.”
Yes, the cloud can deliver specific features for the contact center, such as capacity planning by bursting to handle any inbound/outbound call volumes on demand, as LiveVox officials say: “It can simplify global call routing with a simplified network topology -- without requiring contact centers more hardware and put it between them and the cloud.”
As they put it, the goal of any contact center is to “match up the right agent, customer and channel to get positive outcomes.” And what would be great would be if you could adjust your labor costs to exactly match your need, wouldn’t it? Hard to do with multi-site installations, isn’t it?
That’s one reason companies use cloud contact centers, to get that seasonal elasticity -- more agents when you need them, fewer when you don’t. But as LiveVox says, be careful about the slippery terminology some vendors use:  The word “hybrid” is “marketing’s favorite word to Spackle over one thing to make it look like another.”

Read more here.

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A couple of years ago, Sitel produced a white paper considering the future of call center outsourcing, which was then similar to now a topic of considerable interest.
Call center outsourcing has become a significant source of competitive advantage for many businesses, as well as a source of friction for some customers. Getting it right is a must.
The numbers vary in terms of how many companies are using call center outsourcing, but one thing that doesn’t vary is that more and more companies are doing it. This is because the advantages, as outlined even back in 2008, haven’t changed.
Of course, speaking realistically, price is the overriding advantage. If there were no price advantage to call center outsourcing it wouldn’t happen. Call center costs can be broken into three separate categories, and call center outsourcing has a noticeable advantage in each.
First, are agent-related costs. Across developed economies, the highest input cost in outsourced contact center operations are the wages and benefits provided to agents, which account for roughly 2/3 of total overhead. However, Datamonitor estimates that in offshore and

nearshore delivery locations, these agent costs alone are approximately 33 percent lower than in onshore markets.
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Done correctly, IVR can be a nice customer-friendly app that enables interactions, improves customers satisfaction and lowers operational costs.
So what’s not to like about that?
Officials of Five9, a company selling an IVR with speech recognition, note correctly that if you make IVR an efficient, understandable experience for your customers they’ll use it, reserving your valuable agents' time for more complex inquiries and sales.
But of course, if it’s one of those IVR hells -- “Press 14 for... I’m sorry, I don’t understand that selection. Press 1 for...” -- well, prepare to waste a lot of money on it.
The fact is that you can deploy common speech-enabled IVR applications using the easy-to-use graphical user interface included with the Five9 IVR with Speech Recognition. It includes some of the best self-service apps, including account info, a customer satisfaction survey, delivery notification and others.
It’s a standalone product that can be added to any Five9 Inbound Call Center. With a call center operation including agents, Five9 ACD and Skills-Based Routing features, you’ll get pretty comprehensive control of every customer call “without the hassle and complexity found in many standalone IVR and ACD packages,” company officials say.
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If you’re looking into call center wallboards, bear in mind that dashboards provide critical data as a full screen of charts, graphs and data grids to display the status of the call center.

“Managers using threshold analytics will be shown the KPI’s that are creating the variances in the call center” when using them, according to officials of Spectrum Corporation, which sells XorceView products.
The key words here are revenue and improved productivity. Inefficient call centers cost the business in lost revenue or productivity. As Spectrum officials note, “dashboards show the managers using threshold analytics where inefficiencies exist and where revenue is being lost.”
Among other benefits are access to real time, historical integrated call center statistics and metrics to improve overall call center performance and multiple dashboards available as tabs. Managers can access different data to determine the status of different parts of the call center, and by using threshold analytics, managers can see where in the call center performance is not meeting stated goals.
Read more here.