Managed Services is a way to off-load the responsibility for software, infrastructure and connectivity to a provider. Organizations are embracing managed services as a means to avoid the burden of capital cost and cost of IT management. It is a way to boost productivity and profitability in an increasingly competitive market with commodity-type price pressures.
Managed Services is spreading rapidly into the Contact Center industry. The evolution of VoIP and SIP along with the availability of Cloud services is driving this growth. Managed Services Providers have access to multi-tenant software offering full ACD services on next generation platforms like Asterisk. Service Providers have the ability to bring efficiency and reduce costs through their shared service delivery and IT services automation. They also take away the complexity of Telecom setup. Therefore, these services come at considerable cost savings and eliminate the need for internal technical expertise in planning and managing call center infrastructure.
Managed call center service does not necessarily mean a complete Cloud based system.Virtual call centers and Cloud based services are definitely managed but a service provider should be able to go beyond this and provide infrastructure on-site or in the Cloud or a combination, depending on the need. Distributed contact center operations are becoming the norm and infrastructure availability should dictate the design. A good call center software should be location agnostic and deliver calls from anywhere to agents located anywhere. This is the impending benefit of Managed Services and the convergence of voice and data.
Contact center industry is a mature domain with demanding call work-flow. Asterisk is an extremely good telephony platform for offering Managed Contact Center Services especially with the availability of multi-tenant ACD and Dialer Solutions. Soft-switch based Telecom operators can extend comfortably into managed call center services with an Asterisk based ACD.