Contactual, which provides hosted contact center solutions, recently announced an upgrade to its product, OnDemand Contact Center, giving it the capability to support over 500 simultaneous agents per customer (for details, see Mae Kowalke's article, "Contactual Makes Hosted Contact Centers Friendly for Enterprises").
That triples OnDemand's capabilities, which sounds like quite a sizable upgrade. I was curious about the background story on this upgrade, and I was interested to know how the cost of a hosted contact center would compare to an on-premises solution. To find out a little more, I asked Mansour Salame, President of Contactual. to respond to some questions. Here's our dialogue in question-and-answer format.
1. Please tell me something about Contactual's services and what makes them unique.
The Contactual OnDemand Contact Center is easy to implement; with only a web browser and a telephone line a customer can be provisioned and up and running in as little as 4 hours; it's flexible -- multiple channels (voice, email, chat, voice mail) are all supported in with the same queuing mechanism; out-of-the-box integrations with popular OnDemand CRM systems (Salesforce.com, Netsuite, etc.) are available as well as APIs for integration to legacy systems; and it's valuable, allowing underserved call centers in large and small companies to get “big company” features at low monthly prices.
Contactual’s application is unique because it was built from the ground up to be a multi-tenant hosted application, as opposed to trying to host an enterprise-designed application. Contactual has taken a complete software approach and is completely standards based, including SIP. When paired with a VoIP carrier, this means that Contactual does not require any DSP (voice processing) cards for its implementation, allowing faster scaling of the application.
2. Please explain the recent upgrade in your services and how that changes the picture for Contactual and its customers.
Upgrades to the Contactual OnDemand Contact Center allow customers to scale up to 500 agents per tenant (tripling the previous version’s capacity), provide enhanced VoIP capabilities, and grant users unprecedented level of control over the application. Such scalability gives Contactual an opportunity to target larger companies with complex call center needs. At the same time, smaller firms can rely on Contactual to accommodate their contact center's future growth demands.
Version 5.0 saves call center supervisors’ time by providing agent setup template capability, including queues, assignments and access rights for each user group, thus eliminating redundant data entry. Enhanced SIP phone support gives call centers greater flexibility in choosing their phone device options. Upgraded email management capability allows call center managers and supervisors to handle emails that cannot be automatically routed to an appropriate agent based on keywords. 5.0 gives call center administrators the ability to make changes to or delete unneeded schedules, CRM records and call monitoring files without submitting such requests to Contactual. Finally, the robust back-up functionality seamlessly propagates changes made in the system to the Contactual Backup Tenant, eliminating the need for manual updates and increasing the reliability of Contactual’s disaster recovery procedures.
3. What makes the on-demand model attractive to your customers?
Our OnDemand application requires only a web browser and a phone for a call center to be fully operational. Agents can log into the application any time from anywhere in the world. The OnDemand model allows remote and local agents to function as a unified call center entity with supervisors having access to the same reporting mechanisms as if they were running a physical call center – without the on-premise investment. The flexibility and simplicity of such an approach, along with valuable cost-savings, is what is making the OnDemand model attractive to our customers.
4. What can you tell me about the cost comparisons between an on-premises system versus on-demand? Just in terms of the cost of doing business in the long term, wouldn't it be better for a company to have its own on-premises contact center system?
Contactual’s low monthly fee structure covers everything the customer needs except their PCs, network connections and phone bills. Eliminated over the traditional on-premise approach are capital costs of purchasing the equipment, integration of the PBX with CTI (with our application, we can simply dial any number you support through the PBX), ongoing costs of an on-premise support person on the customer’s IT staff, and fees paid to the on-premise vendor for adds, moves and changes.
A company implementing a 50-seat call center in North America can realize over $350,000 in savings during the first year by adopting the OnDemand Contact Center solution, and about $80,000 on a yearly basis after that. First year savings are derived mainly from the removal of hardware and software expenditures. Additionally, Contactual’s dynamic four-hour JumpStart approach to integration and training drastically lowers costs associated with adoption of the application by call center personnel. On a yearly basis the OnDemand Contact Center provides savings by relieving the client from the necessity of devoting full-time IT resources to maintenance and service of the call center.
In addition to the on-going yearly savings, the OnDemand model grants the call center owner the benefit of always being on the cutting edge of contact center technology. Every version upgrade is seamlessly passed on to the client. Unlike the on-premise hassle of cost-effectively deploying major system upgrades that often threaten the call center’s uptime, the OnDemand approach does not call for any action on behalf of the owner -- Contactual takes care of all technical details and ensures that the call center is never taken off-line.
5. In using an on-demand contact center provider, what issues might arise as a result of latency, as opposed to on-premises? How does Contactual address this concern?
If the provider uses multiple gateways, codec, conversions, and other processing to manipulate the voice part of the call stream, latency can be introduced and will appear as echoes and delays during the call. At Contactual, voice quality is an important criterion. Therefore, the application is designed to reduce conversions by using SIP from end to end in our processing center. Contactual carefully selects qualified carriers for call quality, including routes with a minimum number of “hops” needed to complete the call. When paired with our VoIP providers, the application eliminates all gateways and, therefore, conversions.
6. What's the most exciting thing about what's going on at Contactual right now?
Actually, there are several!
1) We are actively pursuing development of relationships with our overseas OEM partners -- NEC Australia and Vitstage (Japan). And more partnerships are coming.
2) We are planning to open a European office to capture the EMEA market.
4) And of course, the release of the Version 5.0!
AB -- 5/23/06
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I've been a victim, er, customer of Contactual's since they were called White Pajama, and I would wanr anyone considering purchasing their service to think twice. It does some things well, but it is not a very flexible solution. And the support when things go wrong is very poor, very unprofessional. If you need a reliable solution, look elsehwere! Contactual is not it!