One of the most powerful ways to make the cloud work for your company is locating at least part of your contact center there. The call-center-in-the-cloud offers tremendous flexibility and should offer significant cost savings, too. Many companies have already figured this out, according to a new study.

IDC is out with a report this week saying:

“While the majority of companies are still using on-premise contact center solutions, most of them are also using or evaluating a hosted or on-demand contact center service. IDC survey data shows that 39 percent of respondents were using a hosted or on-demand service, 38 percent were evaluating a hosted or on-demand service, and only 23 percent were using an on-premise system and not evaluating the hosted or on-demand model.

Factors contributing to the growth of hosted and on-demand contact center services include cost reduction and pricing model, cloud-based outsourcing, increased shift in spending, and multi-channel customer care.

As customer experience becomes more of a strategic focus for enterprises and the pressures for speed, flexibility, and multi-channel increase, hosted and on-demand contact center services must continue to evolve to keep up to client expectations and support consumers’ future channels of preference.”

Can the social shuffle be managed in the cloud?

 . 

What I like about the on-demand call center is the ability to shift rapidly between phone, email, social media or whatever mode your customers want to use to interact with you.

What an on-demand contact center doesn’t offer is a license for laziness. Placing a contact center out of sight can also lead to out-of-mind, especially among execs far away from customers’ screaming fits and gnashing of teeth.

There are also some circumstances in which a contact center can’t be run as a standalone part of the business and needs a closer interaction with sales and even product development and should be co-located with them.

In some cases, it may make sense to limit what the on-demand call center can do and escalate problems to a separate staff closer to the company. The handoff from one to the other must be seamless to be effective.

IDC predicts this will be a category with significant growth with a CAGR of 17.5 percent. If IDC is right, 2018 spending will be in the area of $1.6 billion for hosted contact centers.

Companies to watch in this space include LiveOps,  Genesys/EchoPass, Interactive Intelligence CAAS , XO Communications and (what don’t they do?) Salesforce.

Not surprisingly, much to be gained by linking CRM to the call center. That isn’t for everyone, but if every customer is extremely valuable to your business, having all their information available wherever needed could be a huge win. You don’t have to choose Salesforce to do this.

The cloud won’t change customer expectations

 .

I want to come back to my concerns about out-of-sight being out-of-mind. Contact center agents are an important public face of many businesses. Low-paid workers who aren’t well-integrated with the organization can’t help but sound that way to customers. Managing a remote contact center is probably more difficult than one close to your headquarters, at least in terms of quality control.

While the cloud can changes how services are delivered, it does not change customers’ expectations.