Contact Centers have never had a good image, but now things are even worse.  The best contact centers are still premise-based phone systems – most VoIP-based contact centers are simply not robust enough to handle most customers’ expectations, even in the best environments (unless you are blessed with a budget for a Rolls Royce model!).  And now, with home-based workers with overwhelmed cable Internet providers, the industry is suddenly reeling.

Technology – early VoIP-based contact centers simply were not very good.  They were designed by data people and lacked many of the features users expected, and were not robust enough to handle many people or calls.

 Costs – Costs range wildly for VoIP-based contact centers.  On the low end, some VoIP carriers give away rudimentary contact center features for free or at a nominal cost.  On the high-end, we see these costs at $100 – $200/agent per month.  Bear in mind, contact center for premise-based systems is expensive.  Good quality contact centers cost between $1,000 to $5,000/agent plus support.  Therefore, how can you expect a VoIP carrier to somehow magically offer an equivalent application for $50/month?  You get what you pay for.  In many cases, the less expensive ones have serious reporting flaws.

Control – though we are in the VoIP business and believe in moving to the Cloud, the one issue with any cloud-based service is that you do not own it. You rent it from somebody else, and in many cases it is on a shared platform with other companies.  This means that the cloud-provider may have to limit what features it offers to you, or what control you have over the contact center to keep you from overloading their servers or affecting other customers.  You also may not have access to make it integrate with other API’s or software because it does not belong to you and they may not have a fully-open API to do special software development.

Compliance – many contact center face special compliance issues.  Healthcare-based companies have HIPAA compliance to adhere to, financial companies have their own compliance requirements, as do stock brokers and insurance companies.  Many VoIP-based contact centers are either not fully compliant, or have some serious gray areas where they say they are.

ComRes can help.  ComRes does have some cloud-based contact centers that can meet needs of many customers, including addressing compliance issues they may have.

One product recently added was our own CloudTalk VoIP Contact Center service.   This seamless addition to our CloudTalk VoIP service uses software from CoreNexa.  This is a mid-priced VoIP Contact Solution that has a variety of standard and optional features such as:

• Standard/Automated Reports
• Realtime Dashboards
• Callback in queue
• Web Chat queues
• Email queues
• SMS Text queues
• IVR
• Call Recording

This service offering meets the compliance requirements of most customers.  If you are interested in moving to a hosted contact center or adding this application to your current VoIP service, please contact your ComRes representative today at 954-462-9600.