Wednesday, August 8, 2012
By Ryann T, Follow me on Google+
Businesses are constantly faced with what seem like very daunting purchasing decisions. And unlike consumers, a business cannot line up at midnight for a new gadget offering a sleeker design and a couple of new features. A purchase today can have an impact on a company many years down the line. Call center and power dialer technology certainly falls into this category. Purchasing a call center solution is like getting into a long term marriage. Call centers, whether on site or outsourced, are capital intensive. Productivity and efficiency gains are weighed against financial and opportunity costs. Ultimately, there are many variables that go into these purchasing decisions. In making these often daunting purchasing decisions, there are four questions there are four questions every organization should ask: 1. Are there any prerequisites to adoption? New technologies must be deployable without first requiring difficult or expensive system upgrades. When making purchasing decisions, these are the first questions a business should inquire into—otherwise they can expect paying significantly more than the advertised asking price. 2. Is the product resource neutral? Resources can be viewed well beyond finances—think of the time of your operations and technical staff configuring products. The opportunity cost of setting up a call center or predictive dialer solution can be quite extensive. Hosted call center solutions create a great alternative to setting up costly on site solutions. CallFire’s IVR solution, for example, can be configured on our platform with a drag and drop GUI that allows users to make complex phone trees and auto attendant applications. These hosted solutions obviate the need to have an IT person oversee a slew of hardware devices and can save a lot of valuable resources. 3. Is the product scalable? To be truly effective, a technology solution needs to be able to scale across an entire organization to a offer significant impact across the organization and service all your customers. 4. Is it immediately deployable? A lengthy call center deployment of up to 6 to 12 months won’t deliver results in a reasonable timeframe. While you’re configuring a call center, competitors are moving faster, and your internal IT and operations staff are boggled down with implementation, when they should be executing strategies to differentiate your business. Cloud based solutions are usually immediately deployable, allowing your company to focus on implementing your business strategy.