Cloud, cloud, cloud — that’s what every vendor offers today and what every (or most) customers want. Whether it’s just a fad to stay innovative or forced by the realities of today’s economic downturn, companies are very receptive to cloud-based, hosted IVRs.
There are those who advocate a hosted solution without any consideration for on-premise alternatives:
…The benefits are substantial in the short and long-term: 1) LOWER COST: There are no/limited set-up fees for a hosted/on-demand offering vs. the extensive programming required for an on-premise solution. 2) FASTEST TIME TO MARKET: A new customer is literally up and running in a matter of hours or days vs. months for an on-premise offering. 3) IMPROVED FLEXIBLITY: An hosted/on-demand offering allows customers to make improvement on-the-fly vs. an on-premise one that can take weeks, as updated coding is required.
If you’re considering a replacement or new IVR or Contact Center solution, GO hosted/on-demand.
Pretty strong words against on-premise IVRs. The three major benefits are quite true, but are the savings in time and money indeed so great? More architectural considerations are in play here, such as data security, performance, system reliability, intellectual property, etc.
How can a hosted IVR solution guarantee the bits and bytes going back and forth are encrypted and secure per company security mandate? What additional licenses, infrastructure, and setup will be required? And if data transactions are going through a secure channel (e.g. VPN) to the databases residing on-premise, then what about performance and caller experience? What happens if the hosting provider suffers an outage? Etc.
Remember the rage from users when Google went down a few months ago? Companies that relied on Google Apps were dead in the water, without access to corporate emails, storage, etc. Now imagine it happening to your hosted enterprise IVRs.
Like any technical solution, the decision to go premise-based or hosted depends on several factors from a company: legal, cultural, and technical. It would be unwise and unrealistic to write off on-premise IVRs simply because it is the trendy thing to do.
Eugene
