Cloud Call Center: Disruptive Good for Business, Bad for IT?

By Erin Harrison, Executive Editor, Cloud Computing

Cloud solutions are everywhere these days, and whether you’re using the cloud to manage your customer database or store your photos, you know the convenience of being able to access a centralized database for information. The same holds true for call centers, where cloud-based services allow for a more flexible approach that give management expanded resources without large capital outlay.

Yet, cloud computing is often referred to as “disruptive” in the IT world – a label that carries with it both positive and negative connotations. According to ZDNet’s Phil Wainewright, adoption of cloud in the enterprise is disruptive in a bad way for IT and in a good way for business.

There’s a reason why cloud is branded as such: “They displace established industries and bring misfortune to those on the receiving end of the disruption,” Wainewright wrote in this blog post.

Over the past 50 years or so, IT professionals have been able to face disruptive changes more gradually, whether it entailed learning new hardware stacks or programming languages. However, cloud is much more elusive, compelling IT staff to deal with a new kind of oversight and accountability for all the various cloud services which businesses are eager to take on.

“For everyone in IT, it means radical changes to working practices and learning many new skillsets, while existing skills become redundant, sometimes overnight,” Wainewright added. “…While IT suffers, the business finds cloud brings vastly improved productivity to existing skills while adding huge new opportunities for innovation and business development.”

For example, cloud call center technologies are advancing by the week, disrupting business models and providing organizations with new platforms that can help them grow. 3CLogic (News - Alert) recently expanded its product portfolio with a comprehensive set of new tools and functionalities that are designed to help users evaluate customer service and sales representative performance, TMCnet reported.

3CLogic explained that it makes use of its own unique V-TAG software and harnesses the latest developments in VOIP and Web 2.0 technologies, making it easy for customers to communicate with their business while also dramatically changing the economics of maintaining their contact center. Users can either deploy the company’s contact center platform in their IT environment, or simply use it as a hosted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) offering.