The smart money is on hosted diallers and here’s why...

THERE is a high probability that your organisation is focussed on two key areas: revenue and reducing costs!  Hosted diallers aid both while remaining “forever young”.

With a dialler on site, you have to ensure you can support it, integrate it and, when required, upgrade it — all of which costs money and disruption to the service.  A hosted dialler can be constantly refined, taking onboard customer feedback and system developments to ensure compliance.  All at no extra cost to you.

All diallers are high maintenance applications, complex to understand with various algorithms and operational processes.  In the hosted scenario, the supplier takes that responsibility into a central environment, maintaining the technical elements on behalf of the dialler, leaving you to focus on what you do best.

The overheads incurred to employ specialist staff to manage CPE diallers can be significant whereas with a hosted dialler the cost model is set against it, meaning it is more akin to the dynamics of your business.  You only need pay for it when you are actually using it, rather than there being a constant overhead.

If a business unit needs to invest in a tool like a predictive dialler, they generally need to undertake a cost-benefit analysis to justify the capital expenditure.  This can be intensive and time-consuming and the capital (particularly in today’s market) can be hard to come by.

Set up for a hosted dialler can be from as little as £3,000, compared with tens of thousands of pounds for a CPE dialler, and can be implemented within 14 days.  There is then an additional per agent per month charge of £70-£150 per month depending on any additional services you may wish to add.

However, it can be turned on and off at the flick of a switch so if you have no campaigns in a particular month, the application lies dormant and costs you nothing.

Perhaps one of the single biggest advantages of hosted diallers is that the suppliers are likely to have stronger negotiating power with telcos than individual call centres.  For example, where you pay 12p per minute for calls to mobile phones a hosted supplier may have agreed a rate of 8p per call.

Assuming the average agent makes outbound calls totalling around 3,000 minutes per month — most of which now tend to be to mobiles — your savings could be about 25 per cent.  That’s around £120 per month, effectively covering the per usage cost for the hosted dialler.

Gareth Owen, head of service delivery, OPEX Hosting, a sister company to Business Systems (UK); marketing@opexhosting.com