Lower total cost of ownership, simplified deployment, reduced in-house staff administration, always up-to-date...
These are the themes echoed in most cloud-solutions marketing collateral - and for good reason - they are consistently the top 4 reasons why businesses of all sizes choose a hosted solution over an on-premises one. It's a compelling pitch, what business wouldn't want to improve their efficiency and reduce their costs?
But... It's not always that simple. Take for example:
A law firm customer I worked with had been using monthly telephone reports to substantiate their activities related to each client. Receiving these details broken down by each client vastly simplified their billing process, reduced errors, and improved billing transparency for clients. They had been using these reports for years and had become reliant on them for simplifying their billing process.
Their phone system was becoming obsolete and the firm made the choice to replace their old phone system with a new cloud-based solution due to some of the above reasons. Their set up was quick, and after a couple months the entire office was quickly trained on and moved over to using the new system.
All was good until the first time client bills were generated after their migration. Their reports now had no unique client numbers on them, essentially giving them no way to associate the time spent on calls with the appropriate client! This was a huge issue for them. Their billing process changed entirely overnight, with staff now were having to keep track of billable time manually.
Needless to say, the customer was surprised to lose this long-time functionality, especially given that their new system had promised more features than their previous premises-installed one. The simple functionality they'd been using for 10+ years was now gone, the new system had no way to allocate calls to clients, and the customer was inevitably left scrambling to find a solution to this issue.
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Genesis Systems makes every effort to ensure our solutions, whether premises-based, virtual-installed or cloud based, feature all of the same functionality to eliminate these types of issues. We consult with your organization prior to implementation to ensure there will be no unpleasant surprises or limitations so you know exactly that you're getting.
For more information on the benefits of Genesis hosted, visit our website at: http://www.buygenesis.com/features/cloud-hosted.htm
