Different types of contact centre

How to improve customer service and reduce costs

Many businesses are looking at their incoming calls as a good way to improve their sales and customer service, as well as to reduce costs associated with call handling. It is probably no great revelation that the best way of achieving these objectives is the implementation of a contact centre, but what you probably do want to know is what is the best way to use a contact centre.

What are the different types of contact centres?

For most businesses looking to review how their telephony services are ran, unfortunately you can’t just pop into your local computer shop or mobile phone shop and buy a contact centre, but fortunately the internet can do a pretty good job of providing the information you need very quickly.

Hardware contact centres are installed on physical servers which are usually procured at a capital cost from the provider and installed and hosted on your site. The hardware contact centre is reliant on a number of different things; a suitable location on your site for the server to be housed, suitable on site disaster recovery procedures such as UPS devices (in case of power failure) back-up systems (in case of hardware failure) and a hardware refresh process (when the server becomes outdated in the future and more powerful servers are required).

To avoid these dependable aspects and un-necessary complications, look for cloud based contact centres as a cheap and flexible alternative.

Benefits of a cloud contact centre

A cloud contact centre is of interest to most businesses due to its flexibility and reliability. With no server to house onsite and with the contact centre hosted purely in the internet or “cloud”, the disaster recovery issues associated with most physical servers become a non-issue. Also, cloud based systems are more flexible as there isn’t the usual required expenditure associated with hardware and software that is needed for most auto attendant or contact centre solutions. Physical software and hardware installs also take more time to set up and get ready, with a cloud based contact centre, your business can have calls directed, recorded and reported on at an affordable price with a very quick lead time.

Disclaimer: This is a guest post.

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