The contact center is a vital interaction point for any organization seeking to deliver positive interactions for their customer base. The challenge, however, is that contact centers can often present costs to the organization that can at times negate the benefits the center was created to serve. Rather than eliminate this important customer service portal, however, a number of organizations are electing to deploy cloud-based communications as a service (CaaS) contact centers to streamline communication channels and gain control over costs.

Philips Healthcare, a developer of health imaging devices, opened a contact center to ensure customers could make the most of their investments by keeping downtime to a minimum. The contact center was designed so that the organization could make resolving customer questions and problems a priority. Philips (News - Alert) Healthcare quickly learned, however, that its contact center has limitations.

According to Erwin Thomas, senior director of the customer care solutions center for Philips Healthcare, the in-house system limited the number of virtual engineers that could be available to callers at any given time. At peak times, the contact center may need to have 200 engineers available, yet the system only allowed 64 of them in the queue. And, while the system could accept e-mail inquiries from customers, Philips Healthcare needed to add another application so the e-mails could be placed in the queue.

Faced with these limitations, a costly system and the prospect of moving out of the current facilities, Philips Healthcare decided it was time to evaluate hosted contact center options. The company, according to Thomas, wanted to make routing customer-centric, and needed an ACD that was flexible enough to be associated with any phone so engineers could be easily reached when working remotely.

After considering a number of key industry vendors, Philips Healthcare selected the CaaS Contact Center solution offered by Interactive Intelligence. Thomas noted this selection was based on the solution’s ease-of-use, its predictable and cost-effective pricing model, and its breadth and depth of features and benefits, such as local control over data, increased flexibility, advanced contact center features, predictable monthly payments and flexible deployment models.

According to Thomas, the deployment was smoother than they expected and the company was able to configure its CaaS Contact Center prior to the move. As a result, Philips Healthcare never dropped a calling during the entire transition. Now, CaaS Contact Center supports Philips Healthcare contact center in Japan, and is rolling out the solution for its UK and Germany contact centers.

“The Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) CaaS Contact Center has given us true virtualization,” Thomas said. “The benefits of this are numerous. As an example, during a recent ice storm we were able to have our agents work at home, thus preventing any interruption to customer service. And with our ‘follow-the-sun’ configuration, we can give customers 24/7 service regardless of where they’re located.”

In addition, Philips Healthcare has been able to more quickly adapt to changing customer needs and immediately leverage many of the sophisticated Interactive Intelligence applications that could have taken months or longer to deploy on-premise. The CaaS Contact Center model eliminates the infrastructure and the management of applications for Philips Healthcare so the organization can focus on executing ideas to meet market challenges and opportunities.