Today, the majority of North American contact centers today are supported by premise-based contact center and telephony systems, a model which has several key benefits:

• A mature and proven deployment model

• Complete control over the systems and applications

• Connection with other business systems and applications

• The financial advantages ownership affords

But there's another money-saving option for contact centers: third-party owned and operated hosted services. The advantages of this model include:

• Rapid start up

• Little or no capital expenses

• Access to the latest technologies,

• Fewer staff required to support the systems

• And more

Which model should you choose for your contact center? Before you decide, there's another factor you should consider: Total cost of ownership (TCO). TCO is a valuable way to compare contact center acquisition and deployment alternatives, but should be viewed as only one element in a comprehensive decision process.

This white paper presents the result of the TCO analysis for 12 contact center configurations.