When I was in high school, I worked for a couple of years at a music store. I remember one customer who came in looking for the Beatles White Album on CD. The customer joked about his purchase that day, as he was a long-time fan of the Beatles and already had the album. In fact, he had already purchased it on vinyl, 8-track and cassette, and was about to buy it for the fourth time, this time on CD. The lyrics and music to "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" never changed, but the customer continued to upgrade the hardware he used to hear the song, which necessitated the multiple album purchases. (When digital music became mainstream, I hoped that customer figured out how to convert the songs on that CD into MP3.)
I can't help but draw a parallel to the companies that continue to purchase call routing and WFO solutions over and over again as their premise-based hardware requires a complete replacement. There was a time (roughly the time of record players, 8-track players, cassettes and CDs) when the only option was a rip-and-replace approach to upgrading those solutions. It was hard. It was costly. It was the only option. Much like that Beatles fan, his only option was buying the same thing again and again, although digitally remastered along the way.
Now that we live in the era of MP3, digital file sharing and the iTunes Cloud, we have many more options for maintaining our music libraries and our call center software. By utilizing solutions in the cloud, you're always on the most current version of the software, eliminating the "rip and replace" approach that was used in the past. The cloud is also highly customizable to suit the specific needs of any given call center and can be changed on-demand to meet the routing needs of any given day. (Kind of like changing the music on my iPod... okay, I'll stop with the music analogies now.) And lastly, the cost model is much easier to sell to the C-suite. As illustrated in a recent Frost & Sullivan TCO analysis of the cloud versus on-premise solutions, the cost savings per year are significant.
