Trying to decide between in-house or outsourced customer service? The answer may be a hosted solution.

It's an old-yet-significant decision: Do you keep your customer service function in-house, or do you hire an outsourcer to run it for you? If you keep everything in-house, you maintain control. But that also means that you are responsible for buying and maintaining the expensive technological infrastructure. Outsourcing can usually provide cost savings, but you may not be comfortable turning over day-to-day operations to a third party.

Fortunately, companies are discovering a way to have the best of both worlds. Hosted solutions enable you to both maintain control of your operations and eliminate costly equipment and technology costs, while you gain the luxury of using the latest, greatest technology infrastructure to power your own applications. Instead of laying out a huge investment to build your own infrastructure and then paying for costly upgrades yourself, the hosted services provider does it for you.

With a hosted solution from a high quality solution provider such as West Corporation, you can make your existing contact center applications more efficient. By running your call center through West's proprietary Virtual ACD, you can route calls virtually anywhere in the world, improving customer care quality while increasing your call capacity. You also enjoy the benefit of West's two decades of experience in intelligently routing calls and managing large-scale customer care operations for many of the world's largest companies.

So what are some ways in which your company can use and benefit from hosted contact center solutions?

* Use hosted technology to allow your agents to work from home. You have probably heard about the huge benefits of implementing "virtual call centers" or "home-sourcing," but what if you don't want to reduce or eliminate your existing workforce? You don't have to with a hosted solution. You can enjoy the same cost-saving benefits by using West's technology to enable your own contact center agents to work from home. West's Virtual ACD makes it possible to drive customer calls to your agents, wherever they may be located, while you maintain full control of your employee base. West can also provide the staffing, scheduling and training tools you need to run everything yourself.

* Use the hosted IVR platform to gain greater scalability. West's proven IVR platform, which has over 130,000 ports, can route calls to any of your custom applications or contact centers in order to increase your call capacity. You maintain your own applications and data, while West provides you with additional capacity, which can be especially useful if you typically experience significant spikes in call volume.

* Use a speech-enabled IVR platform to provide intelligent call routing to your own brick-and-mortar agents and home agents. Speech technology can be extremely powerful if used to both complement and front-end live agent solutions. However, building your own speech application from the ground up can be extremely expensive, not to mention all of the additional upgrade costs you'll incur to keep up with the improving technology. Powered by the industry's leading speech-recognition software, West's Advanced Speech Recognition solutions improve the caller experience by giving your customers the ability to use naturally spoken requests and commands to navigate complex menu systems and conduct transactions. The West system can efficiently handle extremely large grammars; it delivers high accuracy, even with mobile devices and in noisy environments.

West has deployed speech recognition solutions in over twenty languages, and our team of speech scientists, dialog designers and linguists helps companies develop and tune their applications to improve efficiency and drive customer satisfaction.

The most important thing to remember about hosted services is that they do not have to be a replacement for your own customer care operations--they can be an enhancement. Providers such as West today offer solutions that help you get more out of your own contact center agents and applications. Hosted solutions enable you to achieve similar cost-saving benefits and technological advantages, as with an outsourced solution, but you maintain full control of your operations and, most importantly, your valuable customer relationships.

For more information, please contact West Corporation at 1-800-841-9000, or visit www.west.com.

A Special Editorial Series Sponsored by West Corporation