SaaS is an innovation that has brought new power to the contact-center realm, making it an attractive upgrade from on-premises phone systems
To companies that have adopted Software as a Service (SaaS) phone systems, it would be easy to forget that this whole “contact center platform” concept was recently only somewhat more advanced than a string and a couple of tin cans.
Laced with hyperbole as the above statement is, it’s not that far off the mark. The contact centers of yesteryear – around 15 years ago – were little more than a big black box that all the phone lines a business had would run into. When clients got too many calls for the number of lines that were available – save the fax line, of course – callers got the dreaded busy signal. And when the box of wires decided to lose track of some of those calls, it seemed that no organization had someone on premises qualified to fix it.
It was a dark time. Little did we know that, around the corner, there was a technology that would save us.
Moving phone systems to the cloud
The birth of the cloud is not nearly as recent an event as you might think, with MIT accepting a grant to develop a “computer to be used by two people, simultaneously” in 1963. By the late 1990s, that vision evolved to meet the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s definition of cloud computing: “… a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”
While early cloud-computing systems were little more than glorified file servers, the concept always included the idea of running software applications in the cloud. This innovation provided the latest in capabilities to startups and Fortune 500 companies alike, as clients could connect to software over the internet and use however much of it they needed, similar to how they consumed electricity or natural gas.
Today, on the cusp of the third decade of the 21st century, the promise of the cloud has been realized, and the advantages of this business and technology deployment model are here for the benefit of all. From monitoring the flow of just-in-time manufacturing inventory for an auto assembly plant to editing baby pictures on a phone and sending them to a local drugstore for printing, we all depend on the cloud today, whether we know it or not.
Amazon Connect’s cloud-based contact center brings all the benefits of a SaaS platform to companies large and small, with features that make the old Big Black Box systems look like museum pieces:
- Get started quickly. Unlike the telephony solutions of yore (way back in 2004), Amazon Connect can be deployed quickly without having to install lots of expensive new hardware.
- A new contact center from a low price of zero. With Amazon Connect’s Free Tier of services, businesses can start the process of configuring a new contact center for free for 12 months and only pay when they exceed the included usage and calling minutes.
- Leading-edge technology that saves money. The latest and greatest usually comes with an equally impressive price tag. However, that’s not the case with Amazon Connect. You pay only for the service time (how long the software in the cloud is working on your data) and your calling minutes. Both adjust month to month depending on your usage, so you’ll pay more when you’re busy, but costs drop when it’s slower – if your business is seasonal, for example.
- Scalability: Easily add more capacity. Addressing businesses that struggle with seasonal peaks such as the holiday rush, Amazon Connect can instantly scale resources up and down as the volume of interactions requires.
- Deploy new technology without additional investment. Amazon Connect is always under development, with new advances in contact-handling added all the time. The costs of these are distributed automatically and proportionately among the entire user base.
- Access contact-center data to fine-tune marketing efforts. Robust built-in analytics allows users to track customer service performance and address issues and inefficiencies.
The cloud is here and, with Amazon Connect, you have the contact center that powers the world’s largest retailer at your beck and call. Are you considering getting rid of the legacy hardware bottleneck in your business and putting the sophisticated power of SaaS on your side? Learn more today by getting in touch with CloudHesive at 800-860-2040 or through our online contact form.
