The cloud contact center layout utilizes virtualization as a standard foundation to provide a stable and ever scalable platform, allowing customers an affordable way to offer sophisticated omnichannel customer support in a managed environment, extending a number of tremendous benefits to today's contact centers.
What Is Virtualization?
In computing, virtualization refers to the act of creating a virtual version of something, including virtual computer hardware platforms, storage devices, and computer network resources. A virtual contact center is a contact center that is cloud-based and managed completely by the cloud provider.
Virtualized Contact Centers will often:
1) Provide big cost savings:
Virtualized Contact Centers carry inherent lower costs due to increased efficiency and the economies of scale. Financially, virtualization has significant advantages over traditional deployment methods. One-for-one physical Servers are often underutilized, likely using only a small fraction of their resources to deliver a particular application or need. Despite this, companies are still willing to pay a premium by using a single-server-per-application methodology. Virtualization consolidates multiple applications into a fewer number of servers, each running more efficiently. Using less physical servers, as well as less specific and often-times limited vendor-specific appliances, allows businesses to maximize physical resource utilization and minimize capital spending.
2) Provides a greater level of security and business continuity:
With virtualized contact centers, improved business continuity is possible, along with security compliance advantages and disaster recovery planning benefits. There are also planning advantages gained from a newfound ability to manage massive teams (potentially thousands of agents) using centralized reporting tools available in the cloud.
Disaster recovery initiatives are mission-critical and downtime can lead to lost revenue. With legacy solutions, creating a highly redundant environment was complex and extremely costly. Companies that could not afford for downtime in their communications platforms needed to purchase expensive redundant servers and additional licenses. Virtualization platforms instead include features such as high-availability or redundancy and storage migration to keep applications running even in the event of a hardware failure.
Utilizing multiple Virtual Servers, it is now possible to create an environment where multiple servers act as one, allowing applications to remain online automatically and seamlessly during hardware outages. Virtualization also provides companies with a method to create a private infrastructure for disaster recovery. Redundant virtual servers can be placed off-site, allowing systems to be accessed even in the event of a weather-related outage, power outage, or any other unforeseen event that occurs at the main office.
4) Enhances hiring flexibility:
With virtualized contact centers, it becomes far easier for companies to hire remote workers, since the contact center solution is available everywhere. Employees can work from anywhere – their homes, a hotel room, or even a coffee shop – though noisier public areas might mean the agent can only answer texts, emails or support tickets, rather than phone calls. A reduction in commute time can also help boost agent morale.
In addition, it means that the company does not have to invest in extra office space, desks or computers, since the vast majority of home workers provide their own devices. The recruiter gains access to a wider talent pool of agents for more specialized jobs; for example, a London-based contact center could recruit highly skilled agents in Scotland if necessary. Additional capacity is easily obtained by adding resources to the virtual servers.
5) Creates an Eco-friendly environment:
In a world with rising utility costs, and scary levels of global warming concerns, demonstrating concern for the environment has become an essential and humane corporate concern. Eliminating the need to manage a server room’s power, cooling, and capacity is directly related to the managed cloud choice.
What Is Virtualization?
In computing, virtualization refers to the act of creating a virtual version of something, including virtual computer hardware platforms, storage devices, and computer network resources. A virtual contact center is a contact center that is cloud-based and managed completely by the cloud provider.
Virtualized Contact Centers will often:
1) Provide big cost savings:
Virtualized Contact Centers carry inherent lower costs due to increased efficiency and the economies of scale. Financially, virtualization has significant advantages over traditional deployment methods. One-for-one physical Servers are often underutilized, likely using only a small fraction of their resources to deliver a particular application or need. Despite this, companies are still willing to pay a premium by using a single-server-per-application methodology. Virtualization consolidates multiple applications into a fewer number of servers, each running more efficiently. Using less physical servers, as well as less specific and often-times limited vendor-specific appliances, allows businesses to maximize physical resource utilization and minimize capital spending.
2) Provides a greater level of security and business continuity:
With virtualized contact centers, improved business continuity is possible, along with security compliance advantages and disaster recovery planning benefits. There are also planning advantages gained from a newfound ability to manage massive teams (potentially thousands of agents) using centralized reporting tools available in the cloud.
Disaster recovery initiatives are mission-critical and downtime can lead to lost revenue. With legacy solutions, creating a highly redundant environment was complex and extremely costly. Companies that could not afford for downtime in their communications platforms needed to purchase expensive redundant servers and additional licenses. Virtualization platforms instead include features such as high-availability or redundancy and storage migration to keep applications running even in the event of a hardware failure.
Utilizing multiple Virtual Servers, it is now possible to create an environment where multiple servers act as one, allowing applications to remain online automatically and seamlessly during hardware outages. Virtualization also provides companies with a method to create a private infrastructure for disaster recovery. Redundant virtual servers can be placed off-site, allowing systems to be accessed even in the event of a weather-related outage, power outage, or any other unforeseen event that occurs at the main office.
3) Offers more scalability and flexibility:
Solving scalability requirements is one check off which can't be met with a legacy contact center system. No longer do companies need to worry that they’ll outgrow their phone system equipment. Deploying and maintaining separate hardware for every application is time consuming and creates a constant challenge for your internal teams to keep up to date. Systems that are virtualized can be deployed faster and maintained more easily, while reducing technology management headaches.
Solving scalability requirements is one check off which can't be met with a legacy contact center system. No longer do companies need to worry that they’ll outgrow their phone system equipment. Deploying and maintaining separate hardware for every application is time consuming and creates a constant challenge for your internal teams to keep up to date. Systems that are virtualized can be deployed faster and maintained more easily, while reducing technology management headaches.
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4) Enhances hiring flexibility:
With virtualized contact centers, it becomes far easier for companies to hire remote workers, since the contact center solution is available everywhere. Employees can work from anywhere – their homes, a hotel room, or even a coffee shop – though noisier public areas might mean the agent can only answer texts, emails or support tickets, rather than phone calls. A reduction in commute time can also help boost agent morale.
In addition, it means that the company does not have to invest in extra office space, desks or computers, since the vast majority of home workers provide their own devices. The recruiter gains access to a wider talent pool of agents for more specialized jobs; for example, a London-based contact center could recruit highly skilled agents in Scotland if necessary. Additional capacity is easily obtained by adding resources to the virtual servers.
5) Creates an Eco-friendly environment:
In a world with rising utility costs, and scary levels of global warming concerns, demonstrating concern for the environment has become an essential and humane corporate concern. Eliminating the need to manage a server room’s power, cooling, and capacity is directly related to the managed cloud choice.
This post first appeared on Virtual Observations - The CSI Call Center, please read the originial post: here
