Previously, I outlined roles and responsibilities necessary for optimal support of a cloud-based contact center. This blog explores the added benefits many organizations gain when choosing a managed service provider to assist in fulfilling these roles.
Upgrading from an on premise solution to a cloud-based contact center comes with a wide range of optimizations. Cloud-based solutions provide your contact center with opportunities to increase functionality while lowering operating costs. However, managing these upgraded functionalities requires a different set of skills than a traditional contact center solution.
Options for supporting these new roles are often misunderstood. Many organizations fear they will have to invest in fully staffing the required positions or hold valid concerns around the length of time and continued investment of training current staff to gain the required skill sets. However, neither scenario needs to happen.
While some organizations choose to completely staff their contact center support team, others turn to a managed service provider. Managed service providers, like Perficient, help manage the operations and support of your contact center solution. Our a la carte managed service offerings provides your organization the support services needed to fully optimize your cloud-based contact center at a level that makes sense for your business.
Whether your organization needs a turnkey managed services team or select roles to complement your existing IT staff, managed services comes with 6 key benefits.
1) Improved Performance with Proactive Solutions
System performance, efficiencies, and greater reliability are top demands for many organizations. Managed service providers proactively monitor performance which can catch glitches before they turn into problems. By employing 24×7 monitoring and alerting solutions with staff to investigate and react to any triggered anomalies, many problems are detected in advance. Platform issues are often resolved before in-house IT staff even know they have happened minimizing the potential for harmful impact.
Application patching is known to be complex. Organizations tend to shy away from it due to fears around downtime and potential downstream operational impacts. However, an updated patch or new software release may encompass bug fixes, additions, changes, or address security vulnerabilities which organizations should respond to quickly in order to protect their assets and operations. A managed services provider develops and maintains a patch management program ensuring updates and upgrades are regularly tested and implemented following best practices.
2) Technology Enhancements
Technology innovation is guaranteed when working with a managed service provider. They are strictly focused on being the leading technology expert within their vertical. Organizations are spending months, or even years executing systems enhancements. With a managed service providers dedicated team of contact center experts, the ease and speed of introducing feature enhancements, or enabling new platform updates into the business is seamless. This helps you keep on pace with customer & industry competition.
3) Improved IT Efficiencies
A managed service provider is essentially a highly focused, dedicated team available to you without the associated employee costs. This team possesses expert level, specialized skills with a singular focus on your contact center solution. Most in-house IT staff are responsible for a variety of systems and internal projects which can prevent them from being experts in one specific solution. With several systems and technologies, your requests and needs are competing for attention across those other responsibilities.
Having a managed service provider guarantees access to highly skilled Contact Center and development resources. They are dedicated to knowing and understanding the entire solution with defined Service Level Agreements. Support is available days, nights, weekends or holidays with 24×7 availability. This improves the efficiency and dependability of your IT operations.
4) Business Optimization
When a business has limited resources, it limits the time and attention of its employees. Utilizing managed services allows organizations to stay focused on other business needs while the managed service provider focuses on operations and management of the Contact Center solution. This frees up staff to work on strategic project initiatives for the business.
5) Lower Business Costs
The ultimate benefit is the ability to lower business costs. With a service provider, costs are predictable, effective, and easily tracked and understood. Managing full time, highly skilled resources as internal staff has significant costs associated with it . With a managed service provider, consistent high quality service is provided without having to maintain key personnel. Additionally, a managed service provider can minimize the chance of an expensive disaster. Which is ultimately what you’re looking to avoid with a successful contact center.
6) Vendor Management
Organizations benefit from the relationships managed service providers build with software vendors. Managing ongoing platform changes from a contact center vendor can be a tedious, complicated, technical, and involved process. With managed services, the managed service provider would deal with the appropriate vendors, so you don’t have to.
With the endless integration possibilities of the cloud, diverse contact center solutions make it complex to identify where an issue lies (error code, custom code, integrated 3rd party software, or Contact center platform/backend). Managed services makes it seamless by calling one single vendor for all aspects compromising your contact center solution.
When considering the appropriate approach for your support model, these benefits are important to consider. If you choose to leverage a managed service partner, like Perficient, begin the relationship as early in the process as possible when formulating your cloud-based contact center solution. Click here for more information on our Twilio partnership and managed services offerings.
