Hosting Ace Operator

Customer Contact Centers are a vital part of any business because they enable companies to maintain and improve relationships with customers and help improve customer loyalty. Currently most e-businesses use traditional Call Centers and e-mail to communicate with their customers. More and more companies are outsourcing their contact centers to third parties in order to provide better services to their customers and to lower spiraling IT costs. By offering a virtual Customer Contact center to businesses, your company will benefit from the outsourcing trend. You may already be hosting web sites for your customers - hosting a Customer Contact Center is merely an extension of the same concept.

Interested in learning more? Please read the following FAQ about hosting Customer Contact Centers using Ace Operator.

Q What is Ace Operator?
Ace Operator is a customer contact solution from QUIK Computing, Inc. Ace Operator is a software product for enabling live interactions between company representatives and online customers from the company web site. It allows customers to contact live agents at the click of a button, engage in interactive conversation using live chat and exchange information using multi-media content. It also allows companies to monitor visitors to their web site and initiate a conversation. It is an excellent tool for low-cost pre-sales support and any kind of customer services over the web.

Q Why it is so hot?
More and more companies are offering their products and services over the web. Analysts from leading market research organizations estimate that the web services market is expected to grow at a rapid rate for the next 7 to 8 years. In spite of all its advantages, web-based retailing has a major disadvantage compared to traditional retailing - lack of interaction between customers and company representatives. In this discussion, “retailing” refers not only to sale of products but also of complex services frequently requiring consultation such as pharmaceutical, legal, and financial services.

It is a well-known fact that most customers do not complete a sale at an online site because of lack of information. Currently the most common way for online customers to contact the company is to use traditional means of customer contact - telephone support and e-mail. Both these methods are either too costly or increase customer frustration and result in loss of sales and customer loyalty.

A solution like Ace Operator enables companies to:

1. Provide effective pre-sales and customer services to online users by using live company representatives (operators) to assist online customers. It is actually a better way of providing services compared to telephone support because the online users can get connected to the contact center at the click of a button, the operators can push web pages containing information instead of reading out the information to the online user, have the customer fill up custom-designed forms online or use a white board to demonstrate concepts to online customers. In addition, Ace Operator has all the features found in a traditional call center solution including call queuing, call transfers and conferencing.
2.  Increase sales. Studies have shown that when customers' questions and concerns are addressed immediately, online customers are more likely to complete the sale instead of moving on to a competitor's web site.
3. Increase customer loyalty because of the personal touch this kind of service helps create.
4. Differentiate their sites from other sites offering similar products and services.
5. Provide interactive customer service at a much lower cost compared to traditional call center solutions. Operators can be located anywhere in the world. Consequently, companies can hire home-based operators as well as operators from other regions and other countries. Operators can also handle more than one session at a time, thereby reducing the need for additional operators.

All of the above factors are very important for the success of companies selling products and services online, and these factors will become ever more critical as competition grows. Many large companies with an online presence are already using similar services for customer contact including E-Bay, Earthlink and Time Warner. Leading analysts in the area of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) consider this service to be an essential component of any CRM offering.
Q What is the size of the market?
According to market research from leading analysts, currently only 2% of online companies provide pre-sales and customer service use solutions similar to Ace Operator, compared to 76% using traditional call centers and the rest using e-mail and other self-help solutions. Lets face it - no one likes a call center. The customers do not like it because of long hold times and endless transfers. The company representatives do not like it because of the job stress, and the company management does not like it either because of the high cost of operations. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that a number of analysts are predicting that many companies will be switching from traditional call centers to solutions similar to Ace Operator. This is especially the case for companies offering products and services online. The analysts' opinions are divided when it comes to the proportion. Some analysts predict that within the next few years as many as 90% of companies offering products and services online are going to adopt a solution similar to Ace Operator for pre-sales and customer support. Therefore, we consider this market to be wide open at this time.

We have estimated the current size of the market in the US for similar solutions to be approximately USD 30 Million per year. So even if it grows to only 10% in the next 3 years (as mentioned before, only 2% use it today), the size of the market will be well over USD 150 Million per year. The 10% figure is a very conservative estimate. According to most studies, the adoption of such solutions by companies is expected to grow at a much larger rate. Also, we have not accounted for the predicted growth of the e-business sector nor the international market potential.

Q How can ISPs/ASPs and web/services hosting companies benefit from Ace Operator?
Ace Operator is designed to be offered as a hosted service. ISPs, ASPs and web/services hosting companies already offer hosting of web sites and other specialized applications. Ace Operator would be an additional revenue generating application in the portfolio of services that a service provider can offer to its business and corporate customers.

In the hosting model, a service provider installs and runs Ace Operator on a server that has direct access to the Internet and offers the service to its business and corporate customers. When a customer signs up, the customer provides a list of customer services agents (operators) who will be handling chat sessions from the customer's customers. The service provider provisions an “operator group” for the customer and adds the operators to the group. Each operator is assigned a user name and a password. The operators use this information to login to the server from anywhere in the world; all they need to have is access to the Internet and a Java-enabled web browser – no software downloads are necessary. Once logged in, an operator can receive and handle chat sessions from online customers who visit the operator's company website from anywhere in the world.

For hosting this service, the service provider can charge a monthly rate similar to other hosted services offered by the provider. The rate is typically based on the number of operators and the features available to them.

One of the added benefits of hosting Ace Operator is that the service provider can use Ace Operator to provide online help desk support to its own customers. This reduces the need for expensive telephone equipment required to handle customer voice calls and also reduces hold time for customers since one operator can handle more than one customer at a time.
Q How much revenue can a service provider generate by hosting Ace Operator?
We have done a survey of companies offering similar hosting services in the US. These companies are charging anywhere from USD 20.00 to USD 250.00 for each operator, per month. The rates vary widely depending on the quality of the service and the features available to the operators.
Q How much demand is there for such a hosting service?
There are at least 30 companies that offer a similar service today. Many of these companies have a large client list in their web site. Many of these companies are profitable, and some of them have earned more than a million dollars in annual revenue from hosting this service. With an increase in the number of companies offering products and services online, the demand is expected to increase exponentially.

Outsourcing is a major trend in the CRM industry, and more and more companies are outsourcing CRM components to companies that host the service for them. Leading CRM companies including Right Now Technologies, CANA and Live Person offer similar services.
Q What kind of investment does a service provider have to make in order to host Ace Operator as a service?

Ace Operator is a free open source solution - it costs nothing to use Ace Operator.

To host Ace Operator, one needs an Intel server (500Mhz or higher, 256MB RAM, 200MB disk space) running Linux or Microsoft Windows NT, 2000, or XP. The system must have a static IP address and a direct connection to the Internet. Since most of the communication uses text as a media, the bandwidth requirements are quite low - a broadband connections is sufficient for getting started.

Lets take an example. A service provider buys a server for USD 1000.00 and installs Ace Operator.  The total investment for the service provider is:

(** It is assumed that the provider is using its existing Internet connection.)

Let's assume that the provider offers the service for USD 20.00 per operator per month to its customers. The provider can recover its cost in 5 months by signing up a total of 10 operators across its customer base. We have not added any staffing costs because system setup is required only when a new user is added to the system, and an experienced system manager can do the job in a few minutes using a user-friendly, web-based user interface. From the above figures, it is clear that the more customers the service provider signs up, the quicker the return on investment and generation of a steady revenue stream. This example does not consider additional setup fees (very common) that can be charged as revenue nor does it consider the extra revenue potential from premium features like pro-active monitoring.

Also, the investment in hardware may not be necessary because the service provider may already have a spare computer or the provider may install the software in a computer running the web server or other services.
Q How is QUIK Computing going to assist service providers in hosting Ace Operator?

Our primary objective is to spread the use of our software and popularize the concept of web-based contact centers. In order to achieve our objective, we want to empower ASPs, ISPs, Call Centers and web/services hosting companies so that they can host this service for their customers. The following explains how QUIK Computing will assist.

Unlike most of its competitors, QUIK Computing offers Ace Operator software to anyone who is interested. Comprehensive documentation on administering and running Ace Operator can be downloaded from the company web site. Other accessible support mechanisms including a user community discussion forum and full bug database access are available and in place. Here is why Ace Operator is a great solution for you:

1. Ace Operator has excellent support for hosting including support for self-provisioning by the service provider's customers. We are continuously improving the support for hosting.
2. Ace Operator is a free open source software. Therefore, you can use it with minimal risk and investment.
3. QUIK Computing provides various levels of technical and software support. You can use the free support we offer or you can select from various paid support plans.
4. We will list service providers hosting Ace Operator as partners in the QUIK Computing web site. The QUIK Computing web site gets thousands of hits every day, and the listing will increase the visibility of partner service providers.
5. QUIK Computing regularly receives requests/queries regarding hosting. We refer them to our service provider partners.

Q What is QUIK Computing going to get out of all of this?
QUIK Computing is a technology company and would like to remain that way. Our immediate goal is to increase the adoption of Ace Operator among companies offering products and services over the web in order to demonstrate that Ace Operator is an effective way of providing support to online customers. We think it will lead to large-scale adoption of such service and that we will benefit from it eventually.

As more and more service providers start hosting Ace Operator, it will increase the visibility of Ace Operator, leading the way to large scale adoption without QUIK Computing having to invest large sums in marketing and sales. Instead, we will concentrate on the R&D (which we do best) and have service providers be our sales/marketing wing.

Q What kind of support do you offer?
We provide support plans to meet most folks' needs. Check out the details here.

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