Abtech was asked to design a solution for a customer that wanted a call center with outbound dialing capabilities.
The design was a hybrid approach using a combination of hosted and premise solutions. The Contact Center and Recording functionality were premise based and the predictive dialing was in the cloud. We used a ShoreTel platform for the Contact Center and a CSI for Call Recording and Quality Management. ShoreTel is absolutely the best Contact Center platform out there for SMB.
The primary reason for going with Premise was investment protection and support. The investment was not necessarily financial but the investment in time. As you well may know a Contact Center evolves over time. This is significant asset that should be protected. Most people in the industry agree there will be consolidation and defragmentation of Call Center Hosted providers. At which point you will not have any ownership of your contact center and it could go away at anytime in the future. To rebuild would be a significant cost and risk to the business. Additionally with a Premise solution there are hundreds of potential service providers for the ShoreTel platform. If you are not happy with one there is another right behind them. Support happens to be the biggest complaint in the Hosted Communications industry.
Regarding Hosted Dialers this is a good option because you do not have to trunk for outbound campaigns which can be a significant cost. Additionally there are hundreds of these guys out there and you can use a few.
The other element we addressed was dynamic expansion and contraction of agents working at remote locations or from home offices. This is easily addressed using VPN phones and/or SIP trunking (essentially delivering dial tone in the same fashion the hosted providers do)
