How many people vow to put themselves or their family on a budget? Almost everyone. Yet, few people actually stick within the confines of that budget and make better financial decisions.

Why? Many budgets don’t consider the unexpected. Whether it’s because of a car repair or a broken tooth, budgets that spend every dollar of income with no wiggle room are doomed to fail.

Many companies that consider having their contact center technology hosted by a third party also envision dollar signs in their heads. They think that having a trusted vendor maintain their contact center data and applications will be a quick fix to save money and gain new efficiencies.

Only smart companies that do their homework before the implementation truly benefit from this type of solution. Maximize your return on a hosted contact center investment by addressing these “must-haves”:

· Fast and flexible connectivity, including capacity and latency

• Enhanced security
• Solid internal infrastructure

Blaze a faster and more reliable path for your data

The most common mistake companies make when implementing a hosted solution is to assume that new hosted-application traffic will squeeze through their already-tight data connection to the outside world. If your hosted contact center application competes with regular internet access, e-mail and other external applications for bandwidth, this solution may never achieve its potential.

One answer is to have your internal IT staff work with a vendor to install a new WAN connection and router. This segregates corporate network traffic from contact center traffic. Separating the data streams allows you to more accurately gauge where you can improve your contact center performance.

You do not want casual web surfing or large e-mail attachments to affect your contact center agents’ performance. Segregating traffic moves these different types of data along different streams.

Boost productivity by increasing capacity

Another option is to increase the network bandwidth capacity of your existing connection. This instantly boosts the capabilities of your contact center’s applications and data flow.

When you measure your current bandwidth capacity, it’s important to think like your application does. Your contact center applications send data in large packets, not a constant flow of data.

For example, let’s say a contact center agent works with a customer for 10 minutes. During this call, data is exchanged with the host at various points of the customer interaction process. This data exchange is often not complete when the call with the customer ends.

More likely, during the interaction, large blocks of data are sent sporadically. These larger data blocks may travel through the connection at the same time, causing “peaks” of network bandwidth utilization.

Your network and outside connections must handle an average amount of data over time, but they must also withstand peak traffic spurts from applications. To measure both factors, your IT staff and vendor can work with one contact center agent for a few hours. They can test how much data that agent sends and receives, both on average and in terms of peak utilization. With this accurate assessment of data transfers, you can build a network infrastructure to manage that reality.

The lurking problem of latency

In addition to capacity, you must also measure network latency – the time it takes for an Internet Packet (IP Packet) to make it from the source to the destination. The lower the latency, the better for your organization. Ideally, the latency should be 50 milliseconds (ms) or less.

If you plan on running VoIP (voice-over internet protocol), see if you can get a Service Level Agreement (SLA) from your Internet Service Provider (ISP), guaranteeing low latency (under 40 ms is ideal), with no “spikes.” Some ISPs provide low latency but allow peaks and valleys in connectivity. These spikes (up to 200 ms or greater) cause a noticeable drop in quality for a VoIP call.

A managed connection can also provide better latency levels, especially for T1 (or multiple T1) connections to the internet. With a managed connection, such as an MPLS connection, all traffic from your contact center to the host center travels through one vendor’s network equipment.

With this arrangement, the vendor providing the connection can confidently give you performance guarantees (SLAs) because the data traffic runs only through its hardware. Your data remains completely under its control. An MPLS connection is more expensive than a traditional broadband connection, but it is much more reliable for your mission-critical contact center applications.

Six degrees of data separation

A hosted solution means a trusted vendor hosts a great deal of your customer data. Before signing on the dotted line, every company should consider how its vendor will store that data.

Some vendors achieve an efficiency of scale by housing customer data from different customers in the same database. This concept is known as “multi-tenant” capability. Sharing infrastructure in this manner makes sense and keeps costs lower because it takes fewer database administrators and fewer servers to store the same amount of data.

However, certain industries may be prohibited from entering into this type of agreement. Many financial services companies, for instance, must store and access their data separately from other clients’ data. Federal regulations sometimes permit data from different companies on the same server but not stored in the same database. Other requirements are more stringent such as a separate database or even a dedicated network connection.

No matter how you choose to store your data, a good hosted solution provider offers levels of data differentiation, including:

• Database
• Server
• Server rack
• Network switch
• Network router
• WAN connection

Your IT staff can offer insight into what level of isolation your data requires. Some companies also use the opportunity of implementing a hosted solution to add additional levels of security to customer data.

Think inside the box

The fastest network connection and the latest application are no match for a desktop PC with an outdated processor. The final “must have” for a successful hosted implementation is a solid internal IT infrastructure.

Many companies may be tempted to keep existing or outdated desktop hardware to save money. This strategy is short-sighted. There is a direct correlation between an individual agent’s PC and the contact center application’s performance.

How can this be, when both the data and the application are accessed through an internet connection? Some hosted applications require applications to run on the desktop, commonly referred to as thick-client applications. Even thin-client, browser-based applications, like Cincom’s Synchrony™ hosted solution, spend time rendering HTML/Javascript pages.

An updated machine renders pages noticeably quicker than an old, outdated desktop PC. The faster PC improves the experience and productivity of the contact center agent.

Spending money to upgrade the agents’ PCs – especially the RAM, processing speed and hard-drive size – can significantly impact your hosted application’s response time. Data can be compressed on the host side, moving data more quickly back to the contact center. A faster, more nimble PC decompresses data much more quickly, giving your agents the information they need to assist customers in less time. Faster processing and a larger hard drive dedicated to storing temporary internet files allow the PC to cache frequently accessed files.

An investment in the future

A hosted contact center solution provides a low-cost entry into powerful functionality that may not otherwise be feasible, especially for smaller companies. An investment in your contact center is always a wise one. Many of your customers use the contact center as their primary point of contact. Moving your contact center to a hosted solution not only saves money, but also increases contact center performance. This provides a noticeable improvement in customer satisfaction.

The efficiencies of a hosted solution go beyond simply hosting data and applications. As more and more customer data is stored with the host, that host can make suggestions on how to combine databases to create new efficiencies.

For example, sharing customer data with your marketing, sales and product development areas allows them to gain new insights into customer issues, needs and desires. A good vendor suggests innovative new ways to cross-reference customer data and make it relevant for specific business unit goals.

Your personal budget and your company’s budget are not that different. It all comes down to dollars, cents and simple math. If you maximize your network connections, address your security concerns and improve your IT infrastructure, your implementation is much more likely to save money – and enhance the customer experience. Happy customers can only boost your company’s bottom line.

John De Regnaucourt is engineering manager for Cincom Systems’ Customer Experience Management products. He has successfully helped numerous clients create and optimize hosted contact centers. He can be reached at jderegnaucourt@cincom.com. Cincom Systems delivers innovative software and services to simplify complex business processes. For nearly 40 years, we have empowered thousands of clients worldwide to outperform their competition by providing ways to increase revenue, control cost, minimize risk and achieve rapid ROI. For more information about Cincom, call 1-800-2CINCOM (USA only), send an e-mail to info@cincom.com, or visit the company’s website at www.cincom.com. Cincom Systems