“South African contact centres are finally starting to understand the benefits of cloud technology. Now they need to educate themselves so that they are able to understand the functionality available, negotiate pricing and become aware of important considerations,” says Bruce von Maltitz, Director at 1Stream, a specialist contact centre cloud provider.

South Africa’s leading independent telecoms professional services firm, Nebula recently released a whitepaper, sponsored by 1Stream and Collab, titled ‘Hosted Contact Centres, Business Feasibility and Solution Offerings’. The whitepaper was created to serve as a guide, offering independent advice to businesses exploring cloud solutions for the contact centre.

The South African contact centre market is lagging behind the global market, and is still dominated by premise-based systems, but the proven benefits of cloud solutions, which include ease of use, improved disaster recovery and reduced total cost of ownership, are enticing for most businesses.

But, warns Nebula, there are a number of factors to consider when deciding which solutions to select, including:

Required features and functionality
The importance of a purpose-built solution
The level of integration required with third-party services and across channels
The value of integrated eLearning, quality management and workforce management capabilities
Reporting requirements, including historical and real-time

For a full copy of the white paper, visit: http://www.1stream.co.za/wp-content/uploads/1Stream-Hosted-Contact-Centre.pdf