Meet the challenges of establishing and operating call centers with greater flexibility and performance, without having to create and support your own VDI solution

Companies are increasingly outsourcing their call centers. Global call center outsourcing is now a $55 billion market, and offshore outsourcing is growing at an extremely rapid rate: regions such as India, the Philippines and Central and Eastern Europe are experiencing annual growth in excess of 30 percent.* However, whether your company outsources call centers, or operates them yourself, you face significant IT-related challenges:

• Lack of security: Companies with outsourced or internal call center operations can lose control over security, both from data and device standpoints. Because call centers typically operate on shifts, users who share devices may install software that corrupts the endpoint or may change settings in ways that make it difficult for other people to use. Call centers that are populated with rich desktops are at risk of sensitive data being exposed and devices being stolen. This is a particular concern for companies that outsource call centers and don't want their sensitive data to reside at externally-owned locations over which they have little control.
• Poor user experience: Many call centers use server-based computing because of its centralized computing benefits. However, as call center operations become more global, server-based computing limitations become more apparent. The further removed data centers are from call center offices, the more network latency issues arise. This results in poor response times and end user productivity issues – not to mention frustrated customers who have to wait while call center representatives' computers gain access to required information.
• Difficulty scaling: Many businesses are seasonal and, to support changing volumes, they often need to hire new or temporary call center staff. However, because it is extremely difficult to add and remove devices, they end up purchasing and/or supporting a high level of PCs or thin clients to ensure that they have capacity when it's needed. This results in long periods of under-utilized resources and unnecessary costs.

The Desktone Solution

Companies can mitigate some of these call center challenges by converting from physical to virtual desktops – essentially, centralizing desktops into virtual machines that run on data center servers. But moving to a centralized virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is incredibly difficult. It is too costly and time-consuming for corporate IT staff to integrate and support all the technologies (i.e., servers, storage, network, thin clients and virtualization software) required for VDI. In addition, to gain economies of scale with VDI, you must build out a large-scale environment. But even if you have the data center space and connectivity to do this, if your data center isn't located close to your call centers, your end users will still experience performance issues.

Desktone enables call centers to quickly realize the full potential associated with centralized virtual desktops, and even greater flexibility and performance, without having to create and support a VDI solution themselves. With subscription-based desktops as a service (DaaS) on the Desktone Virtual-D Platform, you outsource the building, deploying and managing tasks to service providers who already have the data center equipment, networking and real estate needed to handle VDI. The Virtual-D Platform is the only solution that integrates all enabling virtualization technologies into a single, automated self-service platform. Because it is uniquely designed along two tiers (enterprise and service provider), it lets you manage a collection of virtual desktops that is powered by a very large set of physical resources, which are owned and maintained by a third-party.

Enterprises can realize critical benefits for their call centers by running them on a Desktone-based DaaS environment:

• Hosting location flexibility: By taking advantage of your service provider's existing global network you can choose to leverage data centers – and virtual desktops – that are closer to your international call centers, or can opt to keep the virtual desktops in a more centralized location to improve risk management and compliance. Desktone-based DaaS also provides you the option of choosing a hosted cloud environment, where the physical infrastructure resides in the service provider data center, or managed CPE, where it is located on your network. Or you can use a combination of both models in order to dilute the risk of where the infrastructure resides. In all cases, the service provider owns and maintains the physical resources, and you manage your virtual desktops.
• On-demand scaling: Tap into your service provider's capacity when you need to scale up to handle seasonal or promotional volume.
• Improve data and device security: By using thin client access devices, you ensure that end users can't take data out of the call center facility. By centralizing control over your virtual desktop images, you can ensure that users can't install software that could compromise the endpoint. Additionally, if end users inadvertently cause problems with the operating environment, your administrators can easily roll back to good state. And because your data center utilizes a private connection to the service provider's data center, you don't have to worry about compromising security.
• Ensure optimal performance and increase productivity: Eliminate network latency problems by using service provider data centers that are close to your call centers. And, because DaaS provides a genuine Windows client environment on endpoint devices, you benefit from much better application support than is possible with traditional server-based computing environments, improving end-user productivity
• Improve disaster recovery: In the event of a localized outage, your end users can still get access to desktops and you minimize productivity loss.

To learn more about how Desktone-based DaaS can help your call center operations, contact us at 866-691-5660 or email info@desktone.com.

* Everest Research Institute