What’s in your Contact Center Innovation Budget?

This time of year Contact Centers will start their 2012 budget season. Although number crunching can be tedious, budgets hold the key to investment, growth initiatives and strategic success. Said another way, your strategic success hinges on where you place your capital in the coming year(s).

Does the contact center open new locations or increase offshore or home-based agents? Does the company market new products, develop new service offerings or enter new industries? Can IT analyze customer data to identify opportunities and drive revenue? How can you differentiate yourself from the pack?

Or… Does the contact center invest most of its IT budget to replace a dialer or ACD and then spend months replicating existing integration schemes? Does IT burn precious time and capital by installing an IP-PBX at every location before migrating to VoIP/MPLS? Not too long ago, contact centers were forced into these choices. IT groups were forced to repeat the endless cycle of replacing end-of-life hardware with newer, more expensive hardware because it was the only option to keep the contact center churning.

At their best, contact center budgets and IT planning together create roadmaps that chart growth and successfully navigate change. But do they? Actually, 75% of organizations surveyed by the IT Leadership Academy felt that IT planning was ineffective, according to the 2010 Computerworld article “Why IT Planning is Broken.”

Why? Because contact centers and their IT and operations groups have always had to spend most of their time and money treading water. According to a 2011 Gartner CIO survey, until recently the average IT department spent over two-thirds of its budget just on day-to-day operations. If you had $9 for lunch but had to spend $6 to get to the restaurant, you wouldn’t eat very well.

The cloud changes the budget paradigm. It can save your innovation budget in three ways:

• Eliminates the hundreds of thousands of dollars in dialer/ACD/PBX/IVR capital expenses
• Eliminates tens of thousands of dollars spent on professional services to install this equipment
• Eliminates tens of thousands of dollars in annual maintenance on this equipment

That frees up hundreds of thousands of dollars to be invested elsewhere. The right cloud platform (with dialer, ACD, and PBX integrated onto a VoIP/MPLS backbone) can also deliver you savings on an operations expense v/s operations expense basis, which prior to VoIP/MPLS simply wasn’t possible.

CIOs are already excited about the paradigm shift Cloud is having on their budgets. According to the Gartner survey, CIOs already expect cloud technology to allow them to redeploy up to half of their budgets that previously went to infrastructure/operations management toward innovation and growth.

The purpose of innovation is to differentiate your business. The opportunity cost of outdated technology and old business practices adds up to real dollars and cents.