Four Market Trends Service Providers Should Heed
Demand is up for hosted contact centers
By Randy Saunders, Cincom Systems

Hosted contact centers are the fastest-growing segment of the hosted CRM market and are expected to grow to $1.2 billion by 2012, according to Frost & Sullivan. Just as the outsourcing model is attractive because it enables an organization to concentrate on its core competencies while relying on a service provider to run and manage the contact center operation, the hosted contact center offers similar benefits. Organizations are drawn to the simplicity of the hosted contact center model that removes the burden and expense of building and maintaining the required IT infrastructure for a world-class center; the hosted model minimizes the financial and operational liability.

That’s good news for service providers who can not only add new functionality to their own centers, but also attract profitable new streams of revenue that, for too long, have been the sole territories of premise-based vendors of contact center equipment.

Significantly broadening the market opportunity for service providers are these four trends in hosted contact centers:

Trend #1 – Insourcing
Insourcing is where your clients choose to use your technology infrastructure located on your premises to support a contact center on their premises. This is the classic hosting model. The center may be staffed by your client’s employees, or by your employees under the direct supervision of the customer. Insourcing addresses the control and quality concerns that may prevent consideration of an outsourced solution. The hosted model enables you to provide the technology infrastructure without significant capital investment for the customer, making this approach economically feasible for many potential customers.

Trend #2 – Co-sourcing (hybrid)
A second trend is co-sourcing which is a hybrid of insourcing and outsourcing. In this model, the technology infrastructure is again located on your premises, but the agents may be located at your site, at the client’s, or remote. The hybrid model can provide overflow and escalation capabilities as well as enable a client to segment how certain customers are handled. For example, highly valued customers or complex inquiries may go to knowledge workers who are employed by the client, while more routine contacts are handled by your agents.

The hybrid model is gaining in popularity because it gives clients the flexibility to direct their customers to the best agent resource, regardless of location, as well as load-share volumes across multiple centers and agents.

Trend #3 – Multiple channel demands with a single service expectation Increased customer interaction choices – including e-mail, faxes, web chat, voice, and notifications/alerts – are placing more and more demand on today’s contact centers. Many centers don’t have the infrastructure or resources to properly manage all of the inbound and outbound channels that their customers expect. Even when multiple channels are available, too often agents do not have insight across the channels and service levels are inconsistent. A hosted contact center can provide any combination of outreach/inbound programs across all channels, in a single customer view – a powerful offering that significantly improves service and enhances the customer experience.

Trend #4 – The growing number and competitive advantages of remote users/virtual environments

According to industry research firm IDC, the number of U.S. at-home agents will nearly triple, from an estimated 112,000 in 2005 to more than 300,000 by 2010. At-home agents are generally more experienced and more educated and have lower attrition rates than the traditional U.S. call center worker. Despite being paid higher wages, at-home agents have been shown to decrease the total cost for the call center because shorter calls were answered correctly. Gartner has observed that organizations have saved between eight percent and 30 percent by using at-home agents.

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Randy Saunders is the marketing director for Cincom’s Customer Experience Management products. He can be contacted at rsaunders@cincom.com.

Cincom Synchrony simplifies the complexities of today’s contact center to enhance the customer’s experience, while simultaneously optimizing agent and operational efficiency, and driving better decision-making. By uniting multiple applications, systems and resources into an intelligent agent desktop, along with multi-channel interaction management, Synchrony provides inbound and outbound environments with high-value, low-cost contact center solutions.

For over seven years, Synchrony has been hard at work in contact centers around the world and is backed by Cincom’s four decades of experience and deep domain expertise for rapid and continuous return on investment. For more information, visit www.cincom.com/synchrony.