There are some things that get better with age, like wine, cheese and some life stories. Unfortunately, automatic call distribution (ACD) systems do not make the list!

Here are some of the biggest inconveniences your contact center will face when its on-site ACD unit begins to end of life:

Rising Costs: ACDs need to be constantly maintained for quality purposes, and these costs will only increase as systems get older. This means your IT team will have to work around the clock to fix problems and maintain uptime—as well as make hefty OPEX/CAPEX purchases to complete these tasks. With a cloud contact center solution, however, you will pay for only what you use, freeing you from the unexpected costs associated with new hardware, maintenance and support.

Security Concerns: Since ACDs work in conjunction with consumer data to route calls to the appropriate locations, it’s important to ensure there are no security flaws that could compromise your operation. This is crucial for staying in compliance with security standards such as HIPAA and PCI. Another consequence of older equipment is that once a vendor officially discontinues a product, its support — and tips for how to keep the software secure—often stops too. This means your technicians will have a harder time keeping legacy equipment secure. However, by teaming with a cloud-based contact center provider, you are entrusting security and compliance requirements to a team of engineers who will constantly watch over your contact center to make sure that security is as tight as possible.

Network Downtime: Stop and think about what would happen if your ACD were to crash. Network downtime can cost a lot of money, and many organizations fail to recover completely when it happens. The contact center is one place where this is especially detrimental to the customer experience, and a failed ACD will result in heavy wait times and hang-ups by frustrated customers. This is not something you have to worry about with a modernized, optimized cloud contact center with built-in redundancies and geographically diverse fail-over capabilities.

For more information, check out our whitepaper, Automating Customer Contact Centers to Gain Agility and Analytic Insights.

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