Let me describe the scenario.

I am working from home today and, like I always do, I am using my virtual desktop (VDI) in the cloud. It allows me to work exactly as I would if I were in the office. My colleague, Joe Pedano, SVP of Cloud Engineering, is currently flying at 34,000 feet, somewhere over Indiana, on his way to Las Vegas. He too is using his VDI over the in-flight WiFi. Literally in the cloud.

I knew he was traveling but at the same time I needed him to provision a new virtual server for me. So, we are both working on remote desktops, he shares his screen so we can work out the specifications and he provisions the server.

WOW.

Yes, his WiFi connection was slow and it took about an hour to complete, whereas it would’ve taken under 10 minutes if we were sitting next to one another in the office. But think about how this would have happened just a few years ago. The IT manager would have to put in a requisition to purchase a server, get approvals, cut a PO to the vendor, receive the hardware, probably upgrade the memory, rack the server, install the OS from disk, etc.

It would have taken a couple weeks, maybe a month, and cost a few thousand dollars. Today, we did it completely remotely in about an hour. Now, to sweeten this experience even further, the server he created for me is a standardized template from which several other servers will be cloned in about 3 minutes each.

Wow. Just wow. No matter where you are, the cloud rocks.

1)    How should my call center handle social media?  

2)    How should my call center prepare for mobile customer service?  

3)    What would happen if Billy Joel wrote a call center song?    

I feel that the first two questions are easy, thus I’ve chosen to tackle the third. I imagine this will help you immensely in your career. What would happen if Billy Joel wrote a all center song? Probably something like what you see below.

(Sorry, I would have made a recording of me singing the song, but I have laryngitis from shouting at Billy Joel’s lawyers. Besides, it will be more fun for you to sing it yourself with your agents during slow periods, or when you’ve all just given up.)

“The Call Center Is on Fire”

(to the tune of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”)

ACDs, IVRs
High attrition, battle scars
Spikes in volume, crowded queues
Budgets that are low

Calculating all the calls
Agents running down the halls
Service Level’s all disheveled
Systems that are slow

Senior managers aflame
Saying we take all the blame
Screaming that our stats are bad
Now our call forecaster’s sad

Driving callers to the web
Doing so to get ahead
Please adhere. Need a beer
Handle times are rising!

The call center is on fire
The calls ain’t stopping
Many calls are dropping
The call center is on fire
All the phones keep ringing
Not sure why I’m singing

FCR is down a bit
Unsure how to measure it
Social care has got us scared
Abandonment has grown

Seven agents called in sick
Seven more called in to quit
Callers now are getting mean
And I don’t like their tone

Monitoring all around
Agents lying on the ground
Everyday I have to swim
Through these freaking acronyms

SL, C-Sat, CPH
AHT, I need a break
ASA – blown away
What else do I have to say?

The call center is on fire
The calls ain’t stopping
Many calls are dropping
The call center is on fire
All the phones keep ringing
Not sure why I’m singing

Skills-based routing, traffic peaks
Half the staff releasing shrieks
Shrinkage, blinking readerboards
50 calls in queue

Chat requests and emails swell
Agents don’t know how to spell
All our text is just a mess
I don’t know what to do

Coaching, motivating reps
Work-at-home or under desks
Customers now own our soul
Your call is important – hold

Twitter volume’s on the rise
Facebook too, I want to cry
Time to train? Hide the pain
Obviously I’m insane!

The call center is on fire
The calls ain’t stopping
Many calls are dropping
The call center is on fire
All the phones keep ringing
Not sure why I’m singing

For more customer care related song parodies, check out my “Contact Center Tunes” page, where you can listen to song samples and, if you feel so inclined, download full songs.  (Let me know what you think about “The Call Center Is on Fire” lyrics above – maybe I’ll record the song soon!) 

Greg Levin, author of the Off Center blog (http://www.offcenterinsight.com/index.html), has been researching, reporting on and satirizing contact centers and customer care since 1994. Known for his unique sense of humor, sharp wit and bold opinions about the state of customer contact management, he is still usually allowed entrance into industry events.

Greg is the former Editor of ICMI’s pioneering publication Service Level Newsletter as well as its highly regarded follow-up journal Call Center Management Review. He has written hundreds of feature articles and case studies on contact center best practices, trends and challenges; dozens of comprehensive research reports covering every key industry topic under the sun; and adds a very healthy dose of comic relief and levity to the industry via his uproarious Off Center blog as well as his one-of-a-kind contact center songs.

Despite cute names like ‘Nemo,’ a ferocious blizzard that disrupted the lives of 40 million in early February, and ‘Sandy,’ the infamous hurricane that wreaked havoc to the Jersey shore and lower Manhattan in October, these disasters have been nothing but ugly. The toll these natural disasters have taken on local businesses continues to rise even months later as these areas struggle to rebuild. Hurricane Sandy alone is estimated to cost $65 billion in total damages according to a report released in January 2013 by global reinsurance firm Aon Benfield.

But for national and global businesses with offices in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, Boston and other major urban centers along the Northeast corridor, the show must go on. Business cannot stop just because three feet of snow buried power lines or gusting winds ripped through office buildings. The price of interruption is way too high – in the millions of dollars, for some organizations. Employing disaster recovery strategies is simply too little too late. Instead, the key is Disaster Avoidance.

Just ask Signal Hill, an international investment banking firm that specializes in guiding clients through mergers and acquisitions. While Signal Hill is headquartered in Baltimore, MD, it also has offices in Boston, San Fransico, Nashville, New York and Reston, as well as an international office in Bangalore, India. Signal Hill invested in Evolve IP’s virtual desktop and private cloud solution – The Evolved Office: Desktop – last year…and not a moment too soon. Just months after moving all of its employees’ desktops and line-of-business applications to Evolve IP’s servers to access through the cloud, Hurricane Sandy rocked the Northeast.

“Our New York office building had to shut down for over a week, but all of our employees were still able to access their desktops and critical server applications from home to continue business as usual,” said Michael Parent, a Managing Director in Signal Hill’s New York office. “We also experienced a number of severe storms in the D.C. area – the weather patterns have been extreme with a lot of potential disruptions, but not for us.”

Prior to switching to Evolve IP’s virtual desktop solution, Signal Hill operated one data center at its Baltimore location, plus a secondary facility for data recovery in Colorado. The company needed to upgrade aging hardware and software and employ in-house IT staff to maintain the same level of service availability to their users. The cost was high so they looked for an alternative and trialed the Evolve IP virtual desktop solution. The choice was clear.

Now, all employee desktops run in the Evolve IP private cloud and all data is centrally stored in and accessed through Evolve IP’s award-winning cloud network. They also rely on Evolve IP to host many of its enterprise applications including CRM, email, file storage and document management systems. Users access Evolve IP’s services from any device over the public internet for ubiquitous, device-agnostic access. It is 100% uptime with a redundant cloud platform, enabling disaster avoidance and making ‘disaster recovery’ quite immaterial.

Events like Hurricane Sandy demonstrate the value of moving services to a cloud platform where the weather has no impact. While many Evolve IP customers experienced local power and connectivity outages at their office locations after Sandy, their critical communications and computing environment continued to operate flawlessly in Evolve IP’s cloud. The architecture and geographically dispersed data centers allowed customers like Signal Hill, Colonial Electric Supply, Apria Health Care and dozens of others to easily re-route phone calls, use the cellular network and PSTN, and access desktops and critical files from their homes.

“We are a firm with global clients, so business cannot stop just because a storm has hit one particular region,” added Doug Webster, Managing Director of Signal Hill’s Internet Infrastructure group. “We all work in electronic files and not on paper and would be dead in the water if we lost access to our data in any office, for any amount of time. A poorly-timed business interruption could cost us significant revenue if it affected a merger or acquisition deal.”

Signal Hill’s Baltimore office was also tested when another series of devastating storms crushed the D.C. area later that winter. “Unfortunately, there were many different opportunities for disruptions from the winter storms, but we maintained business-as-usual without skipping a beat,” added Webster.

Handling sensitive information is a day-to-day activity for Signal Hill, so security remains just as important to the company as availability. Because M&A information is highly confidential, Signal Hill must maintain all data securely – any vulnerability could be disastrous and as financially damaging as a natural disaster of any kind. Evolve IP, however, ensures that even if a Signal Hill employee’s laptop or iPad is stolen or lost, there is no breach because the data is housed in the private cloud and no longer stored on the end device.

Evolve IP’s award-winning cloud platform enables organizations like Signal Hill to benefit from the world-class security, availability and performance typically reserved for Fortune 500 organizations. In contrast to the legacy, do-it-yourself model where an organization sets up or continually needs to re-invest in its own systems, data centers and infrastructure, Evolve IP provides the best-in-class software, hardware and architecture that frees up IT resources all while eliminating CAPEX and lowering an total cost of ownership.

With an upcoming vacation around the corner, I couldn’t afford to miss work – I had too much to wrap up before I went away! But, the doctor’s strict orders were to stay out of work until the following Monday to avoid passing the virus onto anyone.

Of course when I left work that Tuesday, I didn’t know I wouldn’t be back in the office until the following Monday. I certainly wasn’t thinking about what files and programs I might need to access or who might try to call me over the next few days. All I was thinking of was getting home to my bed.

As it turned out, it was a great chance to truly put our company’s tools to the test – after all we are the cloud services company and tell our customers every day that our Evolved Office solution  provides the mobility features and functionality that truly allow someone to work from anywhere with an internet connection on virtually any device.

So, how did it go? Amazingly well.

With Evolve IP’s hosted voice over IP phone system I was able to make and receive calls on my cell phone, as if it were my desk phone. With the simple click of a mouse, calls to my desk phone were coming in on my cell phone, and calls out from my cell had the appearance on Caller ID that they were being made from my desk phone. All I had to do was log into my OSSmosis Personal Portal to turn on my Evolved Anywhere fixed mobile convergence (FMC) solution.

A major challenge for employees when they unexpectedly have to work remotely is that they can’t access all of their programs and company files. But, with the Evolved Desktop, I just opened my $200 netbook and logged right into my virtual desktop. From there I was able to work with exactly the same capacity as if I were sitting at my desk using a laptop, desktop or thin client.

Clearly, the days where I needed to lug a heavy laptop around, or deal with an unreliable VPN, or transfer files with a USB drive are gone! My netbook only weighs about three pounds, which makes it effortless to transport. And with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), I simply log in and start working with full access to my Windows environment, programs and even shared company drives. Even better, if I had neglected to take my netbook home with me, it wouldn’t matter because I can also access it from my iPad or my personal PC at home. (Yes, I just said I can run Windows on an iPad – we even have guys running PhotoShop!)

At one point during the week, I needed to provide changes to a marketing document to the graphic designer who was back at the office (missing me terribly, of course.) I sent her an instant message (IM) via our fully-integrated Microsoft Lync, then I launched a desktop share session with her and used the cursor to point out the changes I needed her to make.

The other great thing about Lync was that my colleagues could quickly and easily determine my availability even though I wasn’t in the office. All they had to do was look at my Presence status, to see if I was in a meeting, on a phone call, available or logged off.

Even though I was coughing non-stop last week, I was able to breathe easy in a metaphorical sense because our cloud-based technologies enabled me to avoid getting behind at a time when I was trying to get ahead in preparation of my upcoming vacation.

The timing of my illness in conjunction with the hot business news of the week of the Yahoo telecommuting policy elimination was certainly interesting. My situation was the perfect example, since I was easily able to work from home during my illness. No one in the office had to be exposed to my germs and I was able to remain productive and on top of my work, so that this week between my illness and my vacation is not stress-filled.

When your communications solutions are hosted in the cloud, the ability to communicate and collaborate when working remotely truly is just as seamless and simple as if you are working in the office.

Now, thanks to Evolve IP’s hosted VoIP, Desktop and Microsoft Lync (and my Tamiflu prescription), I am back in the office feeling much better, right on schedule with all of my work and looking forward to my vacation next week.

The path to VDI
The industry has some general terminology for buying desktops and centralizing the hosting of business applications as a subscription-based service that you should be aware of before you start evaluating VDI solutions. The two most widely used terms are hosted VDI and Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS). While there are technical and performance differences between the two (for a closer look, check out the VDI decision matrix), most major decision points are the same. Where these models differ is primarily around resources (shared or dedicated), control, management, and flexibility. While these have a very real impact on the end-user community and customer satisfaction, the business argument for both is very similar.

When talking with potential customers, one of the first questions I’m asked is: Why virtualize my desktops at all? This is a rhetorical question. After all, the customer wouldn’t have come to me in the first place if they didn’t have a preconceived expectation of VDI providing greater IT efficiency and productivity gains, reduced administration, or lower total cost of ownership.

I use this question as an opportunity to right-size expectations in the front end of an evaluation process, because if the organization’s idea is simply to save money, then it really is approaching the process incorrectly. Sure, if analyzed properly, there will certainly be cost advantages to deploying VDI in a hosted model versus building your own VDI architecture.

But these will come from a variety of expense areas, and you need to be sure that you can cover them all. So the real question you should be asking yourself is: Can I get more value (feature, functions, resources, etc.) for the exact same dollar by deploying a hosted VDI model over attempting to do this on my own? In short, you’re looking to get more for your money; the primary driver should not be savings.

To determine the answer, I help customers analyze their existing traditional environment. The traditional environment means keeping the physical machines that you paid a lot of money for, a single operating system that is tied to that physical machine, and your applications that are also tied to that single operating system and machine. End-user experience and performance is tied to what? You guessed it … that same physical machine.

Also included in the traditional environment is the other gear and applications that sit in a closet somewhere else connected together by wires, switches, ports, and plugs. At this point, you’re probably thinking, “Wow, that’s a lot of moving parts — this must be a management nightmare!” If that’s the case, then virtualizing the IT and desktop environment is a good option for you, because it will centralize and virtualize many of the boxes, apps, ports, and plugs.

Once you’ve decided to virtualize, it’s time to decide whether to build your own VDI architecture or align with a service provider that has already built one, completed the heavy lifting, and has a team of competent and experienced professionals on staff.

Building your own VDI architecture
Build-your-own VDI will involve many aspects of your traditional environment. The difference is that you will be centralizing most of the desktop software that your users interact with along with the applications in the data center. This means that you are now sitting resident (local) with all your line-of-business applications (CRM, Accounting, ERP, Document Management, etc.) on the data center high-performance computing gear.

You would then access these centralized desktops through a variety of remote display technologies to paint the “desktop” to your physical devices (laptops, netbooks, tablets, and mobile devices). Think of it as a window into the data center that you have access to from everywhere. A PC, laptop, or tablet is simply a place to access your window.

When making any decision, the best way to determine what’s right for you is to use the tried-and-true list of pros and cons.

Pros of build-your-own VDI:

• Centralized management.
• Simplified application management and upgrades. Install once and deploy many. For example, if you need to migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7, it would be much easier to install this on one virtual desktop, tune that single desktop image, then clone (make an exact copy) for your other 199 users than have to physically touch every single PC or laptop to perform the upgrade.
• Simpler and tighter security.
• Mobility. The ability to enable employees to access a single desktop from many different places.
• Lower total cost of ownership.
• Easy  changes to the desktop environment. Let’s say, for example, that you need to install a new application on 75 desktops that is going to require a 2GB memory upgrade. Collecting all 75 desktops and performing 75 physical memory upgrades can be time consuming. In a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure environment, your memory upgrades are reduced to a few mouse clicks at a central location one time and pushing this out to 75 users.

Cons of build-your-own VDI:

• Staffing extras. If you don’t have the staff with the knowledge to build, manage, and administer this new infrastructure, then you’ll pay a hefty penny either on acquiring the skills from the outside or paying a third party.
• More cost to the data center. Deploying this type of architecture adds to the cost of the data center — computing (processing, memory, and storage), licensing, management, and definitely complexity.
• Dependency. Once you centralize computing, you become dependent on high-availability infrastructure, redundant equipment, network, and the staffing requirements to keep things running.

You’ll notice the cons list is almost equal to the pros list. This is the conundrum that IT and financial decision makers have faced for years: How do we acquire these enormous benefits of desktop virtualization without the trade-off of more upfront cash and a heavier IT burden? Enter hosted VDI.

Hosted VDI
Put simply, hosted VDI is all of the pros without most of the cons. Rather than undertake the task of building your own VDI, you rent the technology and expertise from someone who knows what they’re doing. You’ll save yourself the heavy lifting and have access to a bunch of propeller heads already on staff, while still gaining all the IT efficiencies, maintaining a large portion of control, and leveraging the flexibility of an enterprise-grade platform built for service-provider scale.

You’ll also pick up some additional benefits in this model that make a ton of sense financially and need to be quantified in your total cost of ownership evaluation:

• High availability. Let’s face it, if you are a company with 30 to 1,000 employees, it’s highly unlikely you will ever employ the same level of diversity across all data center elements and networks that a service provider bakes into the offer. It’s just not realistic.
• High redundancy. You pick up access to platform redundancy that is built for 99.999 percent or greater uptime and availability. To be direct, it’s built from the ground up to withstand failures, weather events, and deliver near-zero Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs). Most folks I talk to in the mid-market build data centers to be back online in 24 hours or more in a disaster recovery scenario. For a service provider, there is no such thing as “recovery time.” We build to withstand failures from the ground up and expect to run uninterrupted during catastrophes.
• Better use of your existing IT resources. Free up IT’s time to be more efficient and productive for the operations of the business, rather than dealing with the plumbing. You also aren’t bringing on additional Full Time Equivalents (FTEs) to manage this new environment.
• No capital. You can pay as you go, scale up, or shrink down. The bill changes with you.

After walking through all the options, I want to make it clear that I’m not saying that a build-your-own data center is a bad idea. I’m simply pointing out that you have an alternative. And if you are considering a virtual desktop or application deployment, you might find that for the same dollar amount you can cloud-source and get a lot more value, features, and functions than trying to plow this road on your own.

For a more detailed look at all the differences between the VDI options on the market, refer to the Evolve IP Hosted VDI decision matrix at www.evolveip.net/vdi.

In business, those benefits are even more advantageous. One area where organizations have been quick to adopt the cloud is in communications, most notably with hosted VoIP. More and more companies are moving their phone systems to the cloud as their cumbersome premise-based PBXs reach end-of-life. In fact, according to a 2012 forecast report from Infonetics Research, the number of seats for hosted business VoIP and unified communications services is on track to more than double between 2012 and 2016.

If you are one of those companies that has a legacy PBX that is nearing end-of-life, and you are considering moving your telephony to the cloud, here are five questions to ask yourself, to help you firmly decide:

1.      Do you wish you had more control over your phone system?

If you want to make a simple change, such as re-setting a voicemail password, or turning on your holiday schedule, can you do it yourself with the click of a mouse? When your PBX is hosted in the cloud you can. Evolve IP’s HPBX customers enjoy unmatched control and point-and-click configuration of its services through its award-winning OSSmosis Portal.  Using OSSmosis you can also easily add or move users without needing to pay move/add/change fees and without relying on an outside company to do it for you.

2.      Does your IT staff spend the majority of its time fixing issues or making improvements?

Is your IT staff usually stressed out in the server room? Wouldn’t it be great if they could spend more of their time focused on developing new ways to improve your business? With a hosted IP phone system, your staff can get more done and gain back valuable time that was formerly spent maintaining legacy technology. Imagine what a more productive IT staff could accomplish when they are enabled to focus on your core business!

3.      How much is the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of your premise-based PBX system?

When your VoIP phone service is delivered from the cloud, you benefit from lower TCO than with on-site equipment, and it is provided at a predictable monthly cost, with no up-front or ongoing CAPEX. Your business will also benefit from automatic upgrades and new features added, at no additional cost.

4.      Does your present system provide business continuity?

A cloud-based PBX service provider can easily and affordably provide data protection, back up and disaster recovery benefits. Top tier providers will have several redundant, geographically disperse data centers, so its customers benefit from automatic failover in the case of an emergency such as an extreme weather event or power outage. With services delivered from diverse technology centers over multiple carriers, customers have peace of mind knowing their services are available regardless of conditions at their location.

5. Do you want to take advantage of new communication tools?

With a hosted IP phone system, you will have the ability to receive all your calls on only one phone number using Find Me / Follow Me and Fixed Mobile Convergence features. With Unified Messaging, you only ever have to check one email inbox for all your messages – including your Voice Mail messages, which come in as email attachments. And that’s just the beginning; with unified communications solutions – such as Microsoft Lync – integrated with your phone system, the methods of communication and the resulting productivity gains grow even further.

If you have more than 10 employees and would like to learn more about Evolve IP’s hosted IP phone system with unified communications please click here.

But, it is only after the hosted solution is implemented that customers see many of the “ah-ha” benefits. We think of these as “hidden” benefits because the results are different for each organization, and you don’t know exactly what they will be until you start using the system. These moments provide valuable insight into your business that enables you to make critical improvements.

One of the most immediate benefits is vision into your true call volume. Many managers of premise-based contact centers are not aware that they do not have enough capacity to handle all of their incoming calls. Their customers were getting a busy signal instead of reaching the call center. This ultimately means that the contact center has been leaving money on the table. Usually, that has been the case for many years.

CASE IN POINT:

• One recent customer discovered they had twice as many calls in queue than they were staffed to handle. Their PRI capacity was way undersized for their volume and they didn’t realize they were giving fast-busy signals to hundreds of customers. That meant countless missed opportunities.

• Another customer thought they had plenty of staff and that no caller ever waited to speak to an agent. On the first day they moved to the Evolved Call Center, they had 30 minute hold times. They never knew about all the volume that exceeded their phone line capacity.

Once an organization moves to a hosted call center, it is able to see what is really happening. It can see how many calls are in queue, how long callers are waiting, how many abandoned calls there are, and much more. Once the call center manager has that intelligence, they can make the appropriate staffing changes to accommodate the calling demand.

Every call center will experience peaks and valleys. With a premise-based system, they could only estimate those peaks and valleys. But, with a hosted call center, they can now literally see their peak days and times, and supervisors can adjust staffing schedules and break times accordingly.

The other way that a cloud-based call center helps to improve an organization is the visibility it provides supervisors into the productivity levels of the agents, and tools to assist with training and performance development. Supervisors can see all the performance statistics for all their agents and can silent monitor agents from any location with the click of a mouse.

With Evolve IP’s hosted call recording feature, supervisors can save a recorded call as a .WAV file and that call can be played back during training or during a review as an example of either poor or exceptional performance. The quality monitoring team can access call recordings from anywhere and even “at home” agents are recorded.

The hosted call center platform also provides the opportunity to directly improve customer service. For example, because supervisors can now see calls that have been abandoned – as well as how long each caller waited before abandoning – they can proactively call back those callers to follow up and assist them.

These are just some examples of the hidden benefits that have helped Evolve IP customers improve their businesses. We can only imagine the other ways it might help others in the future as we continue to add new features that are automatically passed along to our customers.