On Demand Call Centers with a Twist

An On Demand Call Center is a hosted call center offering from an ASP which includes services like Automatic Call Distribution, Interactive Voice Response, Predictive Dialing, CRM etc. Compared with an on premise system, a business which buys an online subscription to such a service does not have to worry about technology, infrastructure and IT staff traditionally required to manage such functions in a call center.

One can't help but compare the success of On Demand Call Centers with that of other On Demand services offered by Siebel, Salesforce, Microsoft or Google. Salesforce and Siebel have popularized CRM On Demand while Microsoft and Google have been hugely successful with On Demand versions of Office and Collaboration software. Comparatively, On Demand Call Center services have had a mixed degree of success and acceptance in the market. Next we look at the reasons why this is so and some recent technology evolutions which are bound to have a positive influence on this model.

A quick look at traditional On Demand Call Centers

On Demand Call Centers offer robust call center functionality with minimum investment in time, money and resources. An entrepreneur or a small business can leave technology and software support to the trained staff of the ASP and focus on growing his or her business. However, these advantages can sometimes be negated when the business owner has to sign expensive and long term contracts or is asked to reconfigure his network, dump his existing CRM system etc. Private customizations of such systems are virtually unheard of.

Most On Demand solutions typically offer a wealth of attractive features like ease of use, flexibility and data management. No doubt, these are the features which ultimately drive customers to use these services and make a business case out it. However, these features are designed to be sticky for the customer since otherwise switching costs are quite low in the market. Trouble starts when the customer's business requirements change and there is a need to bring the same On Demand technology in-house supported by the customer's IT staff.

The Twist

Most recently, there have been a lot of advances in VoIP, Grids and Peer-to-Peer technology. For example, VoIP has been widely adopted not only by the call center industry, but a large number of telephone companies and internet providers as well. PC Grids which can work distributed over the internet have been commercialized

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