Quality Management in the Cloud

31 Jan, 2011

By: Berthold Hofmann

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With cloud computing, companies can now benefit from the software-as-a-service (SaaS) approach for their contact center, moving away from local installations for many business applications, including packages for accounting, project management and customer relationship management, and relying instead on the software residing in the cloud.

Advantages of SaaS
Business leaders and CIOs understand the advantages of avoiding the purchase and maintenance of local installed hardware, investment in software licenses and maintenance fees, worry about growing user numbers, and keeping up-to-date with the latest software release. Instead, they can just share the system and the software application with many other businesses at a predictable cost.

With Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), service providers and customers benefit from significant savings due to low entry costs, a short setup time and a permanent technological refresh. Especially for large contact centers, where capacity management is essential to master usage peaks as well as extraordinary growth, SaaS provides the ideal solution. However with SaaS, all types and sizes of businesses can easily gain the benefits of advanced recording and modern speech analytics applications.

SaaS in Contact Centers
Let’s paint a picture of how this would work in your contact center with quality monitoring applications. Your VoIP communications system with ACD and IVR, as well as your contact center management application (maybe your CRM and WFM systems, too), are already hosted by your service provider somewhere in the cloud. During customer interactions, the agents read their script from the web browser and fill in their records into the database via a web form. The telephone conversation is recorded either by the VoIP system itself or by the recording system hosted closest to the VoIP communications system, to avoid overburdening an external network.

Screen recording, an essential part of the quality management process, is facilitated by software installed on the agent’s desktop, and it transmits images to a screen-recording server. The amount of data transmitted is again significantly greater than for audio; however, if you have invested in sufficient network bandwidth, you are in good shape for screen recording in the cloud, too.

For supervisors and managers, the process of agent evaluation and quality reporting is similar to a locally installed web-based quality management (QM) application. As the QM and recording system are designed for multi-tenant use, they already include configuration options for access management, information protection, reporting and analyzing.

Conclusion
SaaS deployment requires system architecture capable of supporting peak usage demands and the ability to process large numbers of transactions in a secure and reliable environment. The quality management software must also meet certain criteria such as scalability, multi-tenant management and ease of use for traditional desktop applications.

Overall, with the above caveats, quality management in cloud computing represents the wave of the future and will become increasingly prevalent as contact centers strive to increase efficiency and functionality in a cost-effective manner.