Is Call Center CapEx Obsolete?
Why Capacity Planning for Cash and Equipment is Fast Becoming a Quaint Concept
An interesting trend to follow over the coming months and year is the ability of contact centers to get financing for capital investments like new technology. They might find themselves caught up in an economic environment that, if no longer an official recession, could at least be called a hangover.
In fact, corporate lending for capital improvements is still difficult to secure, especially in the small-to-medium business (SMB) space where even larger contact center organizations can be segmented compared to the largest companies in the world. Some contact centers have already tabled capital expenditures RFPs due to lending difficulties out of their control, and this has happened enough times that anecdotes are illustrating a trend.
If or when lending will return to normal levels is hard to predict. Some banks and analysts are more bullish, but the degree corporate lending is increasing if at all is typically single digit percentages, according to reports. And most, of that, excluding venture financing, seems to go to the biggest companies. It’s tough to find two economists who will agree on anything, but the phrase “new normal” is used a lot these days.
Although otherwise stable companies might be caught in macroeconomic forces when it comes to raising capital, thankfully cloud contact center platforms are providing a “new normal” path for call centers to acquire and deploy advanced technology without capital expenses.
Yesterday’s alternative would be for contact centers continuing to limp along with outdated and underperforming predictive dialers or maintain sub-optimized call routing techniques with an old PBX and/or ACDX. Productivity suffers. Client performance suffers. Competitive positioning suffers. They no longer need to.
Contact centers are realizing capital expenditures for new and better contact center technology is a thing of the past.
This paradigm delivers unprecedented freedom to contact centers. No longer stuck on the wrong side of a 3-5 year monopoly with a site-premised vendor (and a 6-9 month implementation to boot), contact centers can continue to add functionality, scale and flexibility using existing OpEx.
And contact centers are no longer at the mercy of a bad housing market or the Italian Bond Market when it comes to CapEx for technology.
Pre-cloud pricing models consistently force the buyer to be a fortune teller, and take on all the horizon risk. No more.
