There are a handful of contact center types you can choose from, and the one right for your business will depend on certain factors, like your existing setup, your budget, and your physical space requirements. The following are the main types of contact centers you can choose from.
On-premises contact center
An on-premise contact center setup is installed and hosted by your business. Your business handles everything within your own company premises, including hardware maintenance, upgrades, and software updates for your contact center.
Before you commit to an on-premise contact center, it’s important to remember the following:
- You will need the space in your building to store and maintain servers. This may be a feasible option for a larger enterprise, but small businesses could struggle with the space requirements.
- You would be responsible for maintaining, fixing, and installing updates on a hardware contact center. If you don’t have a dedicated IT team or someone knowledgeable, this could pose problems. Calling in a professional IT provider or hiring someone will increase costs.
- You will need to prepare detailed disaster recovery and business continuity plans for your site that take into account how business operations will recover if the servers or data warehouses are down or destroyed.
Cloud contact center
A cloud contact center (also known as a hosted contact center) has all of the contact center infrastructures hosted off-site by a third-party provider. The provider will be responsible for handling the servers, hardware, maintenance, updates, and a variety of other costs and headaches associated with setting up a contact center.
Cloud contact centers can be a great choice for a small business (or any business) looking to save money and time by having a third party do all the heavy lifting.
Cloud contact center solutions offer a lot over other types of contact centers. Here are five advantages you can expect to find:
- You can quickly deploy a new office anywhere in the world.
- You can easily scale your workforce depending on your business needs.
- You won’t need to worry about getting started, or updates and maintenance because the cloud-based contact center will push those through automatically when they’re ready.
- You’ll only pay for what you need.
- Contact center managers and agents can connect from anywhere in the world, from Los Angeles to Japan to the United Kingdom, as long as they have internet access, opening you up to new job markets and the ability to connect with customers locally.
Let’s take a look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of cloud contact centers: