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Call Centers: Premise, Hosted or Cloud-based?

Once upon a time, buying contact center technology was simply a matter of choosing vendors. You determined which features you wanted, examined your budget and approached the vendors you thought might suit your needs best. This is no longer the case. Today, isn’t not only about the vendor and about the features, but it’s also about the delivery method. Premise-based, hosted, or cloud?

No wonder contact center organizations are confused.

CallCentreHelper recently compiled a sort of “cheat sheet” to help contact centers determine which type of solution delivery is best for them. Understanding your contact center’s business and its needs is what will help you determine what’s right for you.

Premise-based. You are a good candidate for a premise-based contact center if you have a lot of agents working out of a single location. One of the primary strengths of hosted and cloud-based solutions is their ability to distribute well over multiple locations. If you do not have multiple locations, then an on-premise solution will be a good fit.

Hosted solutions. For smaller, geographically distributed or home-working organizations where it can be challenging to source good quality telephony applications which cater for the needs of smaller businesses, hosted telephony (recording, ACD, IVR, queuing, agent reporting and management, etc.) is probably an ideal fit, writes CallCentreHelper. This is a particularly good choice for call centers that need to rely on existing local telephone numbers rather than non-geographic numbers (NGNs).

Cloud-based solutions. If you work in a distributed or virtual contact center environment and want the flexibility a cloud-based solution provides but you are not bothered by using non-geographic numbers or new geographic numbers (GNs), then a cloud-based solution could be your best bet.

There are other factors at play, of course, aside from whether your contact center is a single location or a distributed one. Hosted and cloud-based solutions require little up-front capital and allow companies to pay for only what they use, which is a major bonus for a budget-conscious company. In addition, a premise-based solution is not suitable for a company that maintains little to no internal IT staff. On the flip side, for a company that likes to maintain a high level of control over the management of its contact center solutions, a cloud-based contact center platform may not be right.

In the end, it’s the people who know the contact center best who are well positioned to determine what type of contact center platform would work best. Leaving the decision in the hands of people who don’t directly manage and walk the floor of the contact center is never a good choice. 

Edited by Amanda Ciccatelli

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