Posts Tagged ‘cloud’

Guest post: Cloud vs. Premise-based contact center

John Stepp, President of Free Tech Consultants, shares some thoughts after his visit to the Governor’s Office of Customer Service in Atlanta last week.

I had the pleasure of attending CCNG’s meeting at the Governor’s Office of Customer Service last week in Atlanta and it made me think of all the parameters surrounding the cloud-based contact centers.  But before I get to those thoughts, I have to say that I was also struck by how well run the GOCS contact center is.  The caller experience has been transformed from a frustrating maze of calls to different acronym agencies to one where callers are funneled to a frontend group of agents that have the tools to direct callers to the proper destination with handoff.  I was also impressed by the camaraderie and the leadership of the contact center.  This is truly an example of a well run government agency improving the lives of the citizens they serve.

So the first order of business in any contact center is how well the center is run, from the proper routing of calls to the tools the agents have at their disposal to the attitude of the agents and the desired outcome of the entity involved.  So is cloud-based contact center technology better or worse in achieving these goals?  There is no simple answer, but here are some thoughts to digest.

Your contact center must above all be reliable.  The network you use is key and failover provisions whether cloud or premise based must be airtight.  The redundancy and reliability of the equipment utilized is extremely important, more so for cloud-based contact centers routing to a facility.  And make no mistake, there are certain manufacturers of contact center equipment that are much more reliable than others.

You need access to a variety of tools to allow for changing needs and better analytics.  For example, how easy is it for you to add or subtract agents?  For many cloud-based services this is an advantage.  Are there a variety of tools available for you to use when you need them at a reasonable cost?  This will vary between the cloud-based services, but for premise equipment you can do just about anything if you have the money to devote to it.  How well will the analytic tools work for you?  Typically premise-based equipment will give you a tighter integration.  But of course pricing for these tools has to be factored in.  Since cloud-based tools are typically less expensive per agent, there is a trade off for the tighter integration that premise-based tools give you.

And how much time must be spent in programming the contact center and its tools?  Logically, the cloud-based call contact center will save you time, but that depends on the cloud-based vendor and the availability of the resources they have.  Just as with premise-based equipment, if you go ultra cheap, at some point you are going to find out why it was ultra cheap.  Conversely, just because you pay the extra bucks for what you think is greater reliability or versatility, you may get more headaches and more cost at the same time.  That is why an unbiased consultative approach to new contact center technology and upgrades is vital to making the best decision for any organization.

In the ever changing world of technology and economics, vendors, whether cloud-based or premise-based are a lot like sports teams.  Some years a team outperforms and is a great bet and some years they end up in last place disappointing everyone.  That is why picking the right vendors and technology is both an art and a science.

From PBX to SAX?

Wonderful. Another TLA in the world of telephony: SAX, or Services Access Exchange. Jim Burton, CEO of CT Link, shares his prediction:

We are at the very early stages of the office phone evolution, but it is easy to predict that in the future the majority of office phones will be wireless. This will dovetail with the evolution of how these devices get connected – the role traditionally played by a PBX. In the white paper I predicted a new Connection Model – how we will communicate based on various use cases. In very simple terms, a series of SIP servers – at home, in the office and in the cloud, will communicate to connect users to each other and provide them with access to information.

What does this mean for the future for the PBX? Well, the PBX as we’ve known it will disappear, as it evolves into a Services Access Exchange (SAX). The SAX will know where you are, what devices are available near you and the capabilities of those devices, such as display size, bandwidth, etc.

But for this to occur, the carriers/service providers need to evolve their strategy, as do the vendors providing call control functionality. Some early signs of a shift are visible, although it may be another 5-10 years before everything is in place for this prediction to become a reality.

That’s quite a prediction considering PBXs have been around for decades and are the results of millions of dollars of R&D investment. I’m less optimistic on the time frame, though — 20 years out would be my bet. If COBOL can still play a crucial role in today’s financial transactions, then I don’t see the PBX going away that easily in tomorrow’s telecom market. Even today, instead of ripping out COBOL code and rewriting in another modern programming language, most solutions revolve around adding API layers between the COBOL code and other service modules. Similarly, customers are less inclined to lift and rip their PBX hardware or software to replace it with something else. Maybe SAX-like features will start to exist in PBXs gradually, but the traditional PBX will still have its place in the enterprise.

Reducing carbon footprint in the contact center?

Gary Kim at TMCnet has an article on “How much can telecommuting cut carbon footprint?” which offers some insight into the cost savings related to not having to commute to a corporate office:

Lots of people these days are interested in telecommuting, at least in part because of its ability to reduce carbon footprint. Assume that a 100-person company could allow telecommuting three days a week.

Also, assume that employees commuting an average of 33 miles one day to reach their workplace, and that those employees switch to telecommuting three days a week. Also assume that all those avoided trips are taken by automobile.

That enterprise can avoid producing 6,351 pounds of hydrocarbons, 47,362 pounds of carbon monoxide, 3,146 pounds of oxides of nitrogen and 943,124 pounds of carbon dioxide, while saving 47,773 pounds of gasoline each year.

That analysis uses an average fuel economy of 21.5 miles per gallon.

Assume a fuel price of $2.75 per gallon. Workers save $750 in avoided fuel costs each week. Over a month those employees commuting three days a week save $3,250 in fuel costs and over a year will save $39,000 in fuel expenses.

That’s just the savings for the employees. There are savings for the company, too.

Now applying to the contact center business, is there a way to reduce carbon footprint?

Does a cloud-based contact center solution reduce carbon footprint? Not necessarily. Although there are immediate cost savings associated with deploying a cloud-based IVR, the solution provider still has to power its (massive) infrastructure and employ a sizable operations staff to keep the place running.

What about outsourced agents? Although this lowers your headcount and having to provide office spaces, it’s merely shifting the carbon footprint away to the outsource vendor. Plus, most of the time these vendors are far away — sometimes in India, Latin America, or the Philippines — where they pay even less attention to reducing carbon footprint. Their agents still have to commute to work and maybe use older computer equipment which draws more power.

What about on-demand agents? This is the business model for companies like LiveOps which has a platform for companies to expand and contract their contact center workforce based on demand. Most of these agents are home-based, so they save costs on commuting. However, they still have to power their PCs and broadband equipment, as well as home heating/air. Not so much of a reduction?

And during a solution implementation? Odds are you are flying in consultants from other places to work on your project. Air travel is definitely not carbon friendly. If your company has a green initiative and yet rely heavily on flown-in contractors, then you ought to raise this issue to executives. The company may have bought the greenest technologies, but still deficient in executing a green project plan.

Factors such as globalization, economics, and implementation make it difficult for a contact center to reduce carbon footprint significantly. Is there hope? It’s up to the companies to come up with their green initiatives and make sure everyone, top to bottom, is on board. Company processes and policies should be aligned to facilitate the execution of green initiatives: vendor selection, hardware procurement, telecommuting policy, travel policy, facilities management, etc. If enough companies insist on reducing carbon footprint in their contact centers, then the vendors will pay attention to this demand and adjust accordingly.

Google vs. China is more about cloud vs. premise

The recent brouhaha between Internet behemoth Google and communist China isn’t quite about Google’s “Don’t be evil” corporate motto, even though Google is spinning it that way. According to Google’s analysis of the cyber attacks, they originated from within China and aimed at accessing the Gmail accounts of human rights activists:

Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.

The cyber attacks are a perfect opportunity to further Google’s reputation as a corporate darling. China is an easy target — after all, who can forget the Tiananmen Massacre, beaten Tibetan monks, and detained Falun Gong followers? But by removing the geopolitical filter in all of this, it’s really about the ongoing debate between the Cloud vs. Premise application paradigms. And Big G has a lot at stake here.

Google has been the poster boy of cloud computing. Its massive data centers and network infrastructure are of mythical and legendary proportions, needed to support all of its cloud applications: search, Gmail, Google Voice, Google Apps, etc. It has maintained that using these cloud-based apps are secure.

In fact, soon after President Obama and his staff moved into the White House, they discovered inadequate hardware and software to do their jobs — even basic email operations. Google was able to provide Gmail as a temporary solution.

And in September 2009, the White House announced a partnership with Google to build Apps.gov to offer cloud-based applications to federal agencies:

This dedicated cloud will feature the regular Google Apps suite, which includes Gmail, Docs, Talk and a number of other productivity and collaboration products. The applications suite is delivered as an alternative to traditional offerings from Microsoft and IBM, the big players in business software of this kind, and should provide significant cost savings upfront but also because there is no need for additional infrastructure.

At the center of the cloud vs. premise debate has been security. Obviously with hardware and software off-premise, a company has less control over the security aspects. The success (albeit limited) of the cyber attacks on Google further underscores the skepticism of cloud computing opponents.

Take note when you are choosing a cloud or premised based IVR platform. You have just as much at stake as Google.