Beware the Iceberg Effect

One in a series of "20 Reasons to Host Your Contact Centre in the Cloud".

What is the iceberg effect? Well its a fairly topical catch line, but this doesn't refer to the bad weather we are already having or about to have. Rather it's an analogy used to describe a well-known feature of on-premise software that says you are likely to get stung with a variety of hidden costs including support and maintenance charges.

Having forked out for CAPEX for your on-premise call centre you now have to think about budgeting for upgrades, hardware support and maintenance and these figures will often range from 12% to 18% annually to the vendor for software support alone.

Think hard as well about how that support will get to you. I've just interviewed someone who works for an on-premise call centre provider and when their supplier releases a new version of their software it takes this distributor 3 years to upgrade all their clients. Three years!

We are nearly in 2012. Three years! I still can't believe what I heard.

NewVoiceMedia is a proponent of "True Cloud" - multi-tenant, public cloud. "Beware the false cloud" says Benioff of Salesforce and we are right there with him on that. One version of the software deployed on all nodes for all clients. At NewVoiceMedia this software is updated every week; typically on a Thursday a new version has been deployed that has a new minor feature or two, and perhaps a bug fix. This happens every week and allows us to be really agile about ensuring we can respond quickly to our customers' needs. No client has to pay an annual support fee for this. All customers, large or small, get this same service.

Call up support. Anytime. A support engineer will take the call and get right on it.

There is no extra charge for support or maintenance. So take your choice. On-premise, 18% and wait 3 years to get an upgrade. Or true cloud, nothing to pay and get an upgrade every week.

Download 20 Reasons to Host Your Contact Centre in the Cloud