Hosted contact centre services can help to address a longstanding set of problems faced by enterprises using the premise-based model. Firstly, premise-based contact centre infrastructure is costly for enterprises to build and maintain, requiring significant CAPEX outlay. This problem is particularly acute for small to medium enterprise customers given their relatively limited financial capabilities and in-house expertise. Secondly, enterprise contact centre requirements tend to be fluid and subject to significant change over time, which turns into frequent re-engineering of the infrastructure. This calls for considerable enterprise investment in integration, often a substantial portion of total cost of ownership (TCO). Finally, since contact centres, by nature, are so dynamic, it has always been difficult for enterprises to build and maintain optimum capacities when some may remain idle for a period of time – for example, due to short-term projects and seasonal variance in transactions.

ASP has a wealth of experience in providing technology and services in-house for many of our customers. This means that when it comes to contact centres, we have an understanding of today’s business needs like no other. ASP are well placed to help our major customers to move to an enterprise shared service (hosted) type model and help them achieve their current business transformation requirements.

The business issues we see for our customers can all be impacted upon by utilising hosted call centres.

Drive revenue

The capability to manage many different channels to customers is helping our clients reach further and deeper than ever before. (Solutions to consider: - Transactional IVR, Self Service, E-mail, Web chat).

Lower costs

New technology and concepts like Virtualisation are helping our clients to maximise the efficiencies of resources across their enterprise. (Solutions to consider: - Virtual queuing, branch overflow, home-worker).

Increase customer satisfaction

Our propositions provide clients with the ability to service customers and minimise the pains of high demand or peaky behaviour. (Solutions to consider: - Virtualisation, Transactional IVR, Call back).

Increase business agility

Businesses with the right technology are able to seize the advantage on the ebbs and flow of the global economy. (Solutions to consider: - flexibility of location with an IP network, flexibility of demand with pay as you go agreements).

Managing cultural change

Flexibility in your technology and services is a key element to managing and promoting cultural change within your business. (Solutions to consider: - Home working, branch inclusion, consolidation of technology)

Commercial flexibility.

Some of our hosted propositions offer the ability for customers to pay only for what they use on a monthly basis.

Strategic solution for contact centre’s and remote locations.

A hosted contact centre can provide a quick and easy stepping stone to a unified contact centre platform with the added benefit of providing a straightforward and easily implemented roadmap to convergence.

Traditional Voice (TDM) and new wave voice (VoIP) capability.

Most hosted propositions from ASP can easily co-exist with legacy ACD’s and provide a simple and clear migration path to a fully IP contact centre.

Evergreen technology / business solutions.

With ASP hosting your contact centre technology, clients are free to reduce costs of maintenance and focus efforts on your other business issues and customers.

Standardisation of business processes & change enablement.

Many of our customers have found that as they have grown organically or through acquisition, they are now faced with a set of disparate systems in the contact centre which are unable to give a unified view of the operation and even pass calls between systems. A hosted solution can help to alleviate this critical business issue at a stroke through virtualisation of the agent skill pool.

Centralised business reporting.

A hosted contact centre allows you to get a single consistent view of your call centre operation, where previously disparate systems might be generating several reports in different context.

A Service Help Desk – a single point of contact for service and support.

ASP is able to offer a range of service desk facilities to support the hosted contact centre and allow your people to focus efforts in other more critical areas.

Reduced interoperability problems.

By offering tertiary services into the hosted solution (e.g. IVR,WFM, Voice recording etc), ASP can reduce the burden to go through lengthy tender processes to third parties and check inter-operability with your current platform etc.

Reduced technical customer involvement.

With ASP hosting and managing the contact centre, the network, and providing layered service models, our clients are able to reduce the costs of maintaining on-site skilled resources to keep the service ticking along.

A scaleable service that grows with your business.

ASP hosted solutions allow you to scale up easily in line with your own growth expectations, with minimum fuss. We also have propositions which allow you to reduce your commitment when the need arises, thus ensuring you are never knowingly paying for over capacity. Estimates vary, but generally, most enterprise systems operate at 20% over-capacity which can be minimised by choosing a hosted service.

Whatever the problem, there’s a place for ASP hosted call centres to help in many aspects of your business and CRM strategy.