Key factors in buying a new bespoke contact centre

When looking for a cloud-based contact solution, organisations should ensure that the vendor will understand both their requirements and existing processes, give them bespoke capability and the freedom to modify and adapt applications as the contact centre’s campaigns evolve and change.

The second batch of questions to ask should centre on security, performance and resilience; these factors are largely determined by how the hosting centre is accessed and the procedures employed at the centre itself and this should be discussed prior to vendor selection.

Cloud is commonly perceived to be deployed directly over the public internet and so is associated with latency, performance and security issues.

Consumer-type VoIP services such as SKYPE have influenced our perception of VoIP quality and performance.

The issue with deploying VoIP directly over the public internet is that VoIP service packetise voice and send it over the network alongside all the data traffic, which is fine if there is sufficient bandwidth. But, just like a traffic jam on a road, if there is congestion caused by an excess of traffic or a bottleneck due to network issues, then, just like at road works, packets are held up and VoIP quality is affected.

Your VoIP network can be specified to avoid this issue and so quality can be guaranteed; dedicated connections can be provided and VoIP traffic is not impeded as it can be with the public internet.  In addition, the gateway onto a data network can be set to always prioritise your voice over data traffic, thereby guaranteeing voice quality if your gateway is shared.

And so on to security.  The answer is that security is less to do with whether a deployment is in the cloud or not and more to do with the policies and procedures of the individual cloud provider, the hosting environment and the network design and access.  If the network and processes are designed correctly then security can be as good as, if not better than, an existing on-premise deployment.