The evolution of cloud contact centers

Call centers in pre-digital times

Call centers have been synonymous with customer service for decades. According to records, the earliest call center was implemented by The Birmingham Press and Mail in 1965. This system used the ground-breaking GEC PABX 4 Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) to filter incoming calls and assign them to the free agents. Soon after, ACD technology replaced human operators in various large-scale companies, offering a more flexible automated system that could handle more calls.

The most progress in ACD adoption came in the 1970s when call centers started giving companies a distinctive edge in their markets. As a result, companies rushed to partner with phone operators, while others established their own phonebanks. Fueled by demand, ADC technology advanced rapidly, achieving the capability of distinguishing between call types and connecting them to specific agents. This improvement cut down call waiting times and expanded call center capacity enough to make toll-free calls viable.

Call centers became a global phenomenon in the 1990s. By this time, companies with centers in different sites could route calls among themselves through phone lines. Phone banks pushed innovation even further with 24-hour services, supported by automated voice response and speech recognition.

Advanced network connectivity

Until the 1990s, call centers typically used analog lines to connect to telephone networks. Then the first wave of digital connectivity hit, and the industry quickly realized the need for digitization. Communication protocols soon emerged to define how call centers used digital networks to send information, eventually giving way to IP telephony systems in the early 2000s.

IP systems opened up call centers to the Internet and laid the foundation for today’s Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) systems.

From call centers to contact centers

Call centers were still on the rise and in increasingly high demand at the turn of the century. Although digitization was creeping in, phones remained the number one communication channel globally.

However, the proliferation of mobile devices was causing an exponential increase in calls, and call centers could not expand fast enough. Customers began experiencing long queues and endless automated phone trees, and when they finally got through, they were greeted by the dull voice of an overworked agent.

Fortunately, the digital age was in full swing, and connectivity was gradually expanding from phone and texts to emails, mobile apps, social media, and live chats. Companies began expanding call center capabilities to handle these new channels and encouraging customers to use them. As a result, call centers became central hubs of contact, necessitating a change of name to contact centers.

While the term “call center” is still used today, most industry players consider it outdated. Instead, they prefer calling it a contact center because customers can establish contact with service agents in a lot more ways than they did back in the 1960s. – Read more

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Cloud Computing: Benefits, Disadvantages & Types of Cloud Computing Services

Cloud computing is one of the hottest catchphrases in business today. It has transformed the way organizations store, access and share information, collaborate and manage computing resources. With the advent of the internet, cloud computing has provided new ways of conducting business by allowing companies to rise above the conventional on-premises IT infrastructure.

Cloud computing offers modern businesses flexibility, efficiency, scalability, security, increased collaboration and reduced costs. While the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated cloud adoption, the reliance on cloud technologies is set to continue in 2022, especially with hybrid work taking center stage. So, whether an organization already uses cloud services or is planning to in the coming year, it is imperative to understand the basics of cloud computing in order to take full advantage of cloud-powered solutions.

In this blog, we will explore what exactly cloud computing is, how it works, its benefits and disadvantages, and how companies can protect their SaaS data better.

What is cloud computing?

According to ZDNet, “cloud computing is the delivery of on-demand computing services — from applications to storage and processing power — typically over the internet and on a pay-as-you-go basis.”

In simplest terms, the cloud refers to the internet. When organizations store data in virtual data centers or access programs using an internet connection instead of relying on their device’s hard drive or on-premises IT infrastructure, it means they are operating in the cloud.

Cloud computing can be as simple as “servers in a third-party data center” or entire serverless workloads that are infinitely scalable and geo-redundant. Cloud servers and services are scalable and elastic.

How does cloud computing work?

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing resources, such as IT infrastructure or data center over the internet. This model allows businesses to rent storage space or access software programs from a cloud service provider, instead of building and maintaining their own IT infrastructure or data center. One major benefit of using cloud computing services is that companies pay only for the resources they use.

To better understand its technical aspects, cloud computing processes can be divided into frontend and backend. The frontend component allows users to access data and programs stored in the cloud through an internet browser or by using a cloud computing application. The backend consists of servers, computers and databases that store the data. – Read more

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6 Important Benefits of Private Cloud

As organisations increasingly rely on data-driven decision making, the cloud has become the ideal place to store and process all their data. However, there are a number of options businesses have when it comes to the cloud: these are the public cloud, the private cloud and even a combination of the two, known as the hybrid cloud. In this post, we’ll focus on the private cloud and look at some of the benefits it offers to organisations.

What is the private cloud?

The terms public cloud and private cloud describe how the cloud infrastructure is used. In the public cloud, the virtual servers of individual organisations are hosted on the vast data centre infrastructures of their providers. This multi-tenancy sharing of resources gives the provider the ability to offer customers the unlimited scalability that many of them demand.  

Private cloud still offers the benefits of cloud hosting, including on-demand scalability, but rather than the organisation having its servers hosted on shared infrastructure, it has the private, single-tenancy use of its own hardware.

The benefits of private cloud

1. Compliance

As private cloud infrastructure is solely for the use of a single customer, one of its most important benefits is helping organisations achieve compliance with data privacy regulations. Although the public cloud is a highly secure environment in its own right, the single tenancy of the private cloud makes it ideal for organisations that collect, store and process personal and sensitive data. Its isolation from other users gives assurance that threats that affect other tenants in a public cloud environment cannot impact their own security.

Additionally, the private cloud gives greater leeway for companies to deploy their cloud infrastructure in line with their own access-control and retention policies, giving them increased control over their data.

2. Affordability

While the nature of the private cloud means it is generally more expensive to use than the public cloud, organisations still benefit from the fact that a hosted private cloud is significantly less expensive than creating one in-house. The heavy capital investment needed to build and run an on-site, private cloud datacentre isn’t needed in a hosted environment. As the vendor provides all the necessary infrastructure, organisations are left with a more manageable monthly fee for the service. This can work out far less costly. – Read more

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