What Is an On-Premise Contact Center?
An on-premise contact center is a model where the customer houses all the required software and hardware. Companies that use an on-premise system generally employ or contract specialized IT staff to configure, upgrade, and maintain the contact center.
The on-premise contact center or _legacy contact center_centers on inflexible and proprietary platforms from vendors such as Cisco, Avaya, and Genesys. And with everything companies need on-site, it's no wonder McGee-Smith Analytics estimates about 85% of contact center agent seats will remain housed by on-premise models.
However, recently, cloud-based contact centers emerged to offer an alternative. Some of the most prominent features of a cloud-based model are that it places core contact center services off-site and customers remotely connect to the center via the internet or by phone.
But this is only the beginning for cloud vs. on-premise based contact centers. Read on to learn the features, drawbacks, and differences of on-premise and cloud contact centers.
Most legacy contact centers haven't aged gracefully. After all, inflexible, expensive contact center infrastructures can't scale or adapt to evolving customer expectations and digital innovations. Even worse, with mounting operating expenses, there's little room to invest and improve. The result is often a poor customer experience that devastates businesses: 56% of respondents of Twilio's 2022 State of Customer Engagement Report said they would no longer patronize a business after a frustrating customer support experience.
Additionally, on-premise license fees are expensive. For example, the annual maintenance can cost about a quarter of the license cost, while changes to the system—such as adding a new channel—can become so expensive it's effectively impossible for businesses to afford.
Beyond costs, specialists trained in on-premise systems are increasingly hard to find and hire. As a whole, it's more expensive to run an on-premise contact center when it requires heavy virtual machine power for high availability. Fortunately, the modern cloud contact center answers the legacy problem.