Scalability—a high-falutin’ word for the flexibility to expand or contract service as necessary—is probably one of the best benefits to moving your call center into the cloud. With traditional solutions, the need for additional lines, phones and locations can be expensive to implement. Just ask anyone who has ever tried to get new lines in a hurry from a traditional phone service or PBX company.

Cloud-based VoIP has changed the economics of call centers, making available new options and features for many more companies. For what they paid for basic local, long distance and international calling, virtual call center users get a package tailored for supporting customer service and sales with extra functions that many big players pay a lot more to get.

In our ongoing blog series on how the Internet Cloud is making call centers a great new option for small and mid-sized businesses, we mentioned the benefit of uniting a company and even its outside partners under one phone system. A virtual call center can connect a company by integrating a central office with outsourced locations, partners and remote offices, providing benefits both for workers and the customers they are serving.

What’s the first thing you think of when someone says “call center”? A lot of people in a room—maybe offshore, maybe a “boiler-room” operation—lined up in a phone bank, talking into phones or headsets?

That’s a vision that may soon become obsolete, as cloud-based communication systems transform the nature of customer interaction. Someday soon—maybe just a few years away—“call centers” might have very little to do with either telephones or centers.

In our last blog post, we talked about the advantages of having a cloud-based call center, and we mentioned savings.

Whether you’re looking to reduce your long-distance charges, lower your maintenance costs, decrease hardware expenses, or lower the cost of lead generation, a virtual call center offers cost savings.