Hosted Solutions Update... “Deal or No Deal” | By Bill Peters

Outrigger and OHANA Hotels and Resorts entered into the virtual world of hosted solutions a year ago, April 2005. The hosted solution agreement was with ECHOPASS, a Sprint preferred company that supplies on demand virtual automatic call distributing services for contact centers. Echopass partnered with Genesys and Microsoft to create a very advanced hosted “On Demand Contact Center Technology” that will, in my opinion, start to dominate contact centers in all businesses.

Outrigger and OHANA Hotels and Resorts customer contact center is located in Denver, Colorado. The center had always been equipped with the latest technology both for communications and data processing. In the past the company found it more economically beneficial to purchase the necessary equipment and programs to facilitate its business. With the purchase of these systems came the expensive need for maintenance contracts and technical specialists to keep everything running smoothly. Unfortunately, system upgrades also came into play in order to maintain up to date programs and maintenance requirements.

Then came the hosted world of “On Demand Contact Center Services” in the cloud. What has made these this ASP model so attractive is the use of voice over IP (VOIP). Echopass now connects to the Outrigger center using voice over IP (VOIP); eliminating any secondary communication charge for the delivery of the Outrigger 800 number calls. Before voice over IP, the center would have paid an additional connection charge on each call received.

Where Outrigger really got a big bang for its buck is with the enhanced capabilities that came along with the state of the art hosted protocol. This state of the art hosted protocol had all of the electronic customer touch points, voice, fax, email and chat that are necessary to help achieve true customer satisfaction in how well customer requests are facilitated. Echopass not only gave Outrigger the capabilities of electronically distributing IP calls but most importantly, it gave Outrigger the capabilities of electronically distributing faxes, emails and Internet chat sessions to all sales agents on a skills based routing platform. Prior to this, Outrigger’s in house ACD could only electronically distribute calls. To have all the customer touch points electronically distributed would have taken a very expensive system upgrade $$$$$ to the in house ACD system. Plus it would have increased the cost of our annual maintenance on that system $$$$ and still would not have given Outrigger the upgraded service it receives from Echopass on a pay as you use hosted service.

Due to the rising costs of operating a contact center, it was time for Outrigger to be creative and start to look outside the box for cost savings. A contact center can only cut back so much on human resources before the quality of service goes below acceptable standards. State of the art systems became the answer. But how does one afford them while cutting back on the operating budget? It’s really simple. Look at all the new technology that is available and find the best solution that is affordable when compared against your actual maintenance contracts and equipment requirements of your current systems.

I found that it was very plausible to do just that. Identifying a hosted model that is offering the services necessary to meet your business needs may take a while. The process took me over one and half years but the outcome was well worth it. Besides being able to deliver all chats, emails, faxes and voice reservation requests electronically to my sales agents using voice over IP (VOIP), I have other services available to the company as we grow with this new system. One of the most successful protocols has been the work from home, homeshoring, capabilities that Echopass gives us. We are hoping to have most of our sales agents working from home sometime in the near future. This will enable us to substantially reduce our brick and mortar space while at the same time have our sales agents located in different time zones to better service our guests in those time zones. There are also other services that we intend to take advantage of in the future, such as CRM, CTI, Click to Talk and Speech Recognition and regional sales office programs.

The exceptional aspect about using a hosted solution like Echopass is I don’t have to worry about system enhancements and upgrades. Echopass is partners with Genesys and Microsoft and they do it all for you. All they do is license their different programs to me on a per seat basis. As the business grows I can automatically increase the number of seats needed as well if the business should reduce all I do is reduce the number of seats needed.

The operating cost savings have been substantial. As we continue to change our business paradigm, moving from the Information Age and into the Conceptual Age, we will continue to reduce the cost of operating a contact center and reduce the cost of a transaction.

Hosted Solutions ---- “DEAL”