You can spend thousands (maybe millions) of dollars updating the limited functionality of homegrown or aging software and keep redeploying it (complete with a painful learning curve) to your call center team. Or you can implement a better solution, with less pain and less money.

Delivering applications via Cloud computing or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is now a widely adopted model that provides call centers with better system uptime, better security, more flexible functionality and lower costs – with no server or software maintenance headaches. Practically all components of contact center technology are now available in a Cloud-based model.

IT expert Gartner Research says, “By 2012, 65 percent of support conversations will happen in the Cloud and by 2013 at least 75 percent of customer service centers will use some SaaS application.”

Here are six reasons to consider Cloud computing for your contact center.

1. You are facing a technology refresh cycle.
Many of the technologies you’re using in the contact center aren’t keeping up with the pace of innovation needed in your business. And when you need to update that mission-critical app, you could be faced with costly software release upgrades and the need for more hardware to keep pace with the upgrades. But with the Cloud, you get lower total cost of ownership, even and predictable cost flow, and retention of capital (operating expense versus capital expense). Total cost of ownership is lower since you don’t need in-house hardware or the staff to support the hardware and software infrastructure.

2. You need additional capacity.
As your business grows, you can increase your capacity quickly without the trauma of buying, setting up, and configuring specialized hardware/software for your ACD, IVR, call recording and CRM tools. The additional Cloud-based solutions can augment and work with your current solutions to leverage your existing infrastructure.

3. You need to handle short-term demand and be prepared for disaster recovery.
One of the downfalls of premise-based systems is that you have to engineer them to handle maximum busy hour capacity. In the case of disaster recovery, you may require double the needed capacity. This means you are spending money to buy capacity that you’ll use a small percentage of the time. Cloud solutions use a large shared infrastructure, so your additional capacity is only a small incremental addition to the Cloud provider’s capacity. This enables elasticity: you can rapidly add dynamic capacity and often pay only for what you use.

4. You want to leverage the power of social media.
People go to Google as their first stop to resolve a problem or find the answer to a question. If you search for any product or service issue, you’ll likely find that 50 percent or more of the results are user-generated content in blogs, or on Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. You can leverage this content for your agents and post solutions that show up in search results. Plus, your network of customers will go to work for you - for free! Every business has enthusiasts that, if encouraged correctly, will advocate your product or service.

5. You want to implement a home agent program.
Home agent programs are proving that you can have high-quality workers, maintain your wage rates and lower your attrition. Cloud-based solutions, especially virtual ACD and CRM, make deploying home agents easy. Call recording and quality surveys simplify the measuring and coaching of agents just as if they were in your contact center. Plus, eRecruiting and eTraining are easier with the robust Cloud-based solutions available.

6. You need to overcome functionality limitations (and not break the bank in the process).
Many legacy on-premises systems were not designed to be easily adapted and extended to handle the demands of today’s multi-channel support environment, including web self-service and social media integration. Adapting these systems requires a substantial investment in IT resources and time, whereas Cloud solutions offer new functionality and work with legacy systems for data synchronization or one-time data migration.