Cloud based contact centres go green

Cutting costs and reducing carbon footprint just two of the advantages on cloud nine says Patrick Barnard senior web editor TMNC net

Today’s software-as-a-service or cloud based call centre solutions offer numerous advantages over on-premises systems, including quick and easy deployment, reduced up-front capital expense, improved scalability, reduced maintenance costs and instant access to the most advanced, up-to-date call centre technologies available. Although most organisations cite these as the main reasons for their decision to migrate to a cloud-based call centre system, some also like to point to the additional benefit of reducing their carbon footprint.

 Although the “green technology” movement has been slowed by the recession, many companies are finding that they can still embark on green initiatives without spending a lot of money. One simple way organisations can reduce their carbon footprint is by migrating to cloud-based solutions, including cloud-based call centre software. By outsourcing their call centre communications infrastructure, equipment and applications to a third party, companies can significantly reduce their energy costs. In turn this can help them qualify for state or local tax credits, energy credits from utility companies, and other incentive programs (and recognitions) for engaging in green practices.

Organisations that maintain their core call centre systems on-premises pay a bundle for the related energy costs – including the cost of lighting and cooling the additional space in the server room. A traditional on-premises call centre relies on numerous separate pieces of equipment including IP-PBX , ACD, IVR, dialer, recorder, email server and chat server, plus additional servers may be needed for systems such as workforce management or speech analytics.

Most of today’s SaaS  based call centre solutions, however, are “all-in-one” software suites, with all of the applications tightly integrated on a single IP-based platform. Thus several pieces of equipment that would normally be found in a traditional on-premises TDM-based call centre are consolidated into a single IP server, residing in a data centre, which delivers all of the core applications over the Internet or dedicated network. That means fewer potential points of failure, compared to a traditional system -- and in this regard, it can be argued that today’s “all-in-one” SaaS-based call centre solutions actually provide better reliability than on-premises systems.

But getting back to the topic of energy consumption ... here’s something else to consider: You might argue that even though an organisation has outsourced all of its contact centre infrastructure and hardware to a third party, that means it has merely pushed the energy requirements off to another entity, which must still power up the servers in a data centre - therefore there is no real benefit to the environment. While that might be partly true, consider that almost all data centres now employ “green” technologies and are designed for maximum energy efficiency. Consider also that there are major “economies of scale” to be gained through the powering and cooling of the vast numbers of servers residing in a data centre compared to if all these systems are operated independently. This, combined with the fact that most SaaS vendors are offering “all-in-one” software-based solutions requiring fewer components, means the SaaS model is far more energy efficient compared to the on-premises model.

Contactual is a leading provider of SaaS-based call centre software to small to medium sized businesses. The company’s On Demand Contact Centre is an “all-in-one” call centre platform delivering core applications including ACD with multimedia and skills-based routing capabilities, IVR, real-time call monitoring/call recording, CRM integration, real time reporting and more. This advanced call centre software solution is built on Contactual’s  patent pending Advanced Virtual Tenant Architecture (AVTA), which means organisations subscribing to the service share server resources in the data centre dynamically. This results in energy efficiencies -- but at the same time the solution includes a tenant-specific call limiter that ensures there are no spillover bottlenecks between tenants that could affect performance. This advanced call centre software solution is hosted in Contactual’s state-of-the-art, energy-efficient data centres, which offer built-in redundancy and 99.99+ percent availability.