Verizon, inContact partner on cloud-based contact center service

Verizon today announced a partnership with inContact, through which the carrier will offer inContact’s cloud-based Virtual Contact Center services—initially in North America beginning in January 2012 but expanding to the Asia-Pacific and Europe-Mideast-Africa regions later in the year.

Verizon has had contact center services since the mid-1990s but has realized that “we need to make a leap to broaden our capabilities,” said Lori Anne Pollock, group manager of Verizon contact center services product management, in an interview.

In comparison with the contact center offerings that Verizon had previously, Pollock said, inContact’s offering is a more feature-rich solution. She said inContact’s solution is better integrated across applications, has a better user interface, supports multimedia capability and is better integrated with premises-based solutions.

Virtual Contact Center also includes software that can recognize incoming callers and refer specific customers to agents with the appropriate level of expertise.

Scalability is key
Verizon is seeing increased interest in using a cloud-based approach to the contact center as a means of saving costs and as a means of enabling the contact center to more easily accommodate bursts in call volume. By using Virtual Contact Center services, a person with a personal computer, Internet connection and 10-digit phone number can function as a contact center agent—a capability that is gaining increased interest as more companies look to use virtual contact centers.

“The real driving force we see is the ability to scale up and down,” said Mariann McDonagh, chief marketing officer for inContact. “Most businesses are impacted by some seasonality.”

Business users also may prefer a cloud-based contact center solution because, unlike a premises-based solution, it can support a service level agreement, McDonagh said.

Pollock expects early adopters of Verizon’s Virtual Contact Center offering to be smaller companies, but she added that the carrier expects to “go up market” to companies with several thousand agents.

McDonagh added that in the mid-market, a business choosing a cloud-based solution can end up with a more robust offering than the business could afford to support on its own.

Although inContact has other partnerships involving Virtual Contact Center, Verizon is the company’s only carrier partner—and will have an exclusive in North America “for a time,” McDonagh said.