Premier Technologies' cloud evolution
Announcement posted by Premier Technologies - Cloud Contact Centre 03 Apr 2013
It was 1995 when the company developed a digital dictation system for St Vincent's Hospital. As cofounder Lorenzo Marasco told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2007, "It was an Australian first. Doctors were no longer tied to doing dictation, after an operation, on to hard-wired dictation devices that recorded onto magnetic tape. This new solution was portable so doctors could record from any telephone anywhere in the world."
Premier Technologies was founded by Lorenzo and brother Fausto in 1986. It has come a long way since then, surviving the dot.com crash along the way. And as the pace of change has quickened the company has had to become much more nimble.
Fausto told WhaTech: "The [cloud contact centre] market has evolved very quickly. This seems to have been driven by the rapid maturity of customer expectations. Customers saw the benefits they were getting from cloud-based social media applications and quickly sought to translate these benefits into the cloud-based contact centre offerings. With these changes in customer expectations, we've had to rapidly shift and update our product offerings so that we're still responding to customer demands."
He added: "Keeping up with the expectations of the market is a big challenge particularly given the work required to productise an offering that can deliver the scale with the efficiency that a cloud based offering requires."
And, he says, its ability to achieve scale efficiently and economically and to provide customised solutions are what put Premier ahead of the competition. "Achieving scale in a cost effective manner is quite a challenging task. It requires focus and attention to every aspect of the delivery process to make sure it is engineered in the most efficient manner possible. It's very rewarding both technically and professionally when you get this right….
"An area that we chose to focus on is the delivery of high levels of customisation and integration to other systems as part of our cloud contact centre offering. This takes advantage of the years we spent as a contact centre system integrator and utilises these skills in a cloud delivery model."
According to Fausto, over the space of just a few years, cloud contact centres have moved from being a novel technical alternative to on-premise solutions to being recognised as the legitimate method by which contact centre technology will be delivered to most organisations.
He says that this rapid maturing of cloud contact centre has come on the back of an increasing acceptance of cloud computing in general. "The last 12 months have seen cloud-based solutions recognised as the future de facto choice for CIOs. This has been a radical evolution in a very short time frame."
Down the track he sees the growth in connectivity and high-powered mobile devices as driving demand for the flexibility and convenience that only cloud contact centres can offer.
"The availability of high capacity bandwidth, both to our PCs and mobile devices, will lead to a revolution in communications methods. This is already happening now as smartphone devices continue to dominate the market place. Smart mobile devices will drive up the interactions that a consumer may have with organisations. Businesses will need the scale of cloud based contact centres to address the large fluctuations in demand that a highly connected society may generate."
And Premier will be there to help them. It's a long way from the 80s when, as Fausto told the SMH, the company got into call centre technology after visiting a trade show in the US and saw some early computer telephony equipment. "I had an interest in electronics and telecommunications. This combined all our passions and hit on all our areas of interest, right when call centres were starting up."
About Premier Technologies Cloud Contact Centre Solutions
Premier Technologies Premier Contact Point provides cloud-based hosted contact solutions that meet the needs of businesses in a tough and competitive environment. Businesses that use their services decrease their capex and increase their agility while providing the highest quality customer service. To learn more about Premier Technologies Premier Contact Point: premiercontactpoint.com