Contact Center Cloud vs. On-Premise: Analyzing the Costs

It’s time to replace your existing premise-based contact center solution (automatic call distributor (ACD) or dialer). The current system is probably more than 8 years old and fully depreciated. It has served you well, but it’s old and needs to be replaced, particularly because it has been “end of life-d” (EOL’ed) by the vendor, and maintenance costs are increasing at an alarming rate. In addition, it’s likely that your current ACD does not integrate well with your existing customer relationship management (CRM) solution, nor does it have adaptive real-time intelligent routing functionality or a universal queue (UQ) to support email, chat or social media. In short, the current contact center solution is inflexible, prevents you from delivering the service expected by today’s consumers, and is difficult and costly to maintain.

Based on DMG’s worldwide benchmark study of cloud-based contact center applications, 62.4% of companies have already implemented cloud-based contact center solutions. Of those companies not yet using a cloud-based solution, another 45.6% are planning to implement one in the near term. The reason is because cloud-based contact center solutions have many advantages over premise-based offerings. They do not require a large up-front capital expenditure, easily scale up and down to meet business needs, come with ongoing upgrades at no additional cost and without disruption, and require substantially fewer internal resources to maintain and administer. Additionally, the new cloud-based contact center solutions are highly flexible, multi-tenant, hybrid environments that are easy to use and maintain. They often come with an excellent administrative environment and user interfaces, are designed to easily integrate with third-party applications (in-house or external) and support “big data” and analytics. These fully blended ACD/dialer solutions are highly efficient, virtualized, resilient and dependable. See Figure 1 for a comparison of cloud and on-premise acquisition approaches.