TCO Help Desk Cloud Software-Acquisition Costs
It is important to look beyond the "Sticker Price" for your Call Center/Customer Service or Help Desk software!! Your CIO or VP of Customer Service is very interested in the one time acquisition costs as well as the recurring costs which are also called lifetime costs. The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) industry is taking significant market share away from the traditional software vendors for good reasons. Many of the reasons are just simple economics. You will not have all of the recurring costs with the SaaS approach as you will with purchasing and deploying traditional software. The initial acquisition costs are also an order of magnitude lower with a SaaS approach.
Here is a list of Acquisition costs to that you should be considering.
Acquisition Costs
Application Cost:
What is the basic cost of the server software?
Licenses:
What is the cost for user licenses?
What is cost for customer licenses?
Is there a charge for creating and viewing records?
Up-front Customization:
If lacking necessary features, what is the average number of hours to customize the tracking system before it can be used? (Small, medium and large changes)
Consulting cost for customizing?
Server Requirements:
What are requirements?
Will we need a new server or an upgrade?
Cost for server hardware?
What databases are supported?
Will we need a new database or an upgrade?
Cost for database?
Operating system software requirements?
Cost for upgrade or new operating system?
What server applications are necessary for network connectivity?
Cost for network software?
Web Implementation:
Cost of Web application to allow customer submits and queries and users to close calls?
Web server hardware requirements?
Cost of Web server or server upgrade?
Operating system software requirements?
Cost for upgrade or new operating system?
What server applications are necessary for network connectivity?
Cost for network software?
Cost of licenses to have any customers use the Web tool.
Report Writer:
Does application have a built-in report writer so that graphical results can be distributed?
Average cost of report writer application?
Average cost to integrate with report tool?
Is there a real-time view of the information?
Development Environment:
Cost for a development server application?
Cost for admin licenses?
Cost of user license?
Cost of customer licenses?
Cost of operating system software?
Cost of networking software?
Cost of database and license?
Training Costs:
Cost to train administrators?
Cost to train uses?
Is there multiple training locations for my global company?
What are there the training options available for all the different needs I might have?
For a good White Paper on the topic, please see https://www.givainc.com/wp/it-help-desk-software-cloud-whitepapers.cfm and select
Looking Beyond Sticker Price: "What It Really Costs to Operate a Call Tracking System"