Currently, one of the fastest growing trends for contact centers and outsourced contact centers is to move away from costly equipment based, premise based call center platforms and to move to more versatile, “on demand” virtual call center platforms.  Companies that have moved to or are using a virtual call center platform in some capacity include: Overstock.com, AMD, Vonage, Expedia.com, Hilton Grand Vacations, Kodak, American Express and many others.  Why is this transformation to virtual call center platforms taking place?
 On Demand FunctionalityVirtual call center platforms provide an on-demand solution for …

The number of businesses vying for office or factory space depends on the size of the area as well as the economic health of the community in question. A small town with limited resources is not likely to have people clawing each other out of the way to get the prime business locations. A commercial real estate agent must be able to gauge the interest of the target audience as well as the other factors of the market to close a deal. No matter how tepid the economy has become, …

There are countless individuals who would be perfect additions to your contact center or business; however they are not sitting in your office right now waiting for their interview time to arrive. They are stuck at home because of disabilities, mobility problems, vision problems or because they are working around a child’s schedule that is not compatible with the nine to five work day.
Of all of the people you are interviewing on site, only a few are acceptable to you and of the rest, only a handful found the job …

Outbound IVR, also referred to as Proactive Notification, has become one of the most popular business solutions on the market today. Traditionally it was used for notification services, such as emergency and collections. Today’s Outbound IVR solutions offer a wider range of benefits, including enhancing customer relationships, reducing inbound interactions with live agents, and increasing revenues with compelling interactive outbound sales and marketing campaigns. By proactively contacting customers, companies can provide personalized, relevant and customer-specific information in a timely manner.
New research reveals the North American market for hosted outbound integrated voice response …

When a company is faced with the critical decision of choosing the platform to base their call center operations on they are faced with a new set of options.  The old traditional model of equipment based versus the emerging one of those provided virtually require consideration of questions not previously asked.  Typically, a call center consultant or manager who has worked with equipment based platform solutions will argue “if we own our equipment then the cost to maintain what we already have versus the monthly cost of a virtual platform …

Q: Been reading quite a bit on this topic and would like some clarification.
How does a virtual solution stack up against a traditional hardware based solution including:
ROI (Capex)
Technology Integration with existing infrastructure
Deployment
Bandwidth reliability and ongoing support
A: The question of Virtual Platforms to support In-House Teams or Virtual Teams has been in high interest in recent years for obvious functional and financial reasons. To respond to your questions:
ROI (Capex):
These items are usually separate in that ROI is a return on investment and CapEx is an actual expenditure or funds applied to …

Companies no longer are able to afford hundreds of people hunched over their phones with dog eared pages of cold calling scripts or coffee stained lists of potential customer’s names. The days of battalions of onsite phone answering personnel are long gone. Virtual call centers are more cost effective in the long run, and they free up time spent on mundane tasks for other, more seriously required aspects of customer care. Cold calling by a real person is only done by those companies that are bound to stay locked in …

Imagine that every single person in your business feels like they are personally accountable for the satisfaction of every customer. Imagine how hard every employee would work in that case. Now visualize that there is a way that you can track not only the service calls but the service tech that handled the call, right to the last detail.
Monitoring Your Calls in the Call Center
 Envision a system of monitoring customer satisfaction via the call center. What aspect of the call that was not handled properly? Or at what point did …

The business that you have worked so hard to build up deserves only the best solutions for its every need. Those needs will continue to change as the business grows and must be as unique and self realized as the business itself. What your business needs to be at its optimum operations is different from what the business next door needs. What your business needs this month or this year is different from what it might need next year.
To address all of these needs, the business must find the right …

Virtual Call Centers: A Way of the Future
Way back in the past, there were huge brick and glass buildings, looming up in the sky and mastering the city streets. Those buildings were filled with employees, all doing basically the same thing and the costs grew out of control. Soon, the buildings grew outdated and were torn down for even bigger and grander designs, until one day they grew so big that they collapsed the companies that built them.
The sheer cost of keeping a building of any size up and running …