Manual processes in the contact center are generally the enemy of productivity. While very small contact centers may be able to get away – at least sometimes – with manually dialing outbound calls or figuring out schedules on spreadsheets, the larger a contact center is, the more damaging these processes are to productivity and success.

The problem is that traditionally, smaller contact centers simply couldn’t afford broad feature sets in products. Thanks to the cloud, all that has changed. Smaller companies and even medium-sized organizations can acquire the types of features that were formerly only available to the largest of companies, all while keeping in their budgets.

Call center on demand solutions provider Five9 (News - Alert) recounts the story of Englishtown, the world’s largest online English school. The company’s Monterrey, Mexico-based contact center had experienced brisk growth in head count, but not on technology. The company’s system was rudimentary, and saw agents hand dialing calls. According to Englishtown sales intelligence specialist Hiram Zamora, supervisors were unable to get any information on call volume or call disposition. Investment in a simple dialer didn’t help very much.

“So much time was spent trying to contact customers,” Zamora says. “Sometimes agents had to make five calls just to get someone on the phone.”

The problems were only exacerbated as the company grew and the contact center added headcount.  Agents were using Salesforce to manage customer contacts, but the application was not integrated into the dialer, which meant that agents had to toggle back and forth between the dialer and the CRM solution on the desktop, which lead to lost time and prevented them from making many calls per hour.

 “It was easier to control when we only had a few agents,” said Gilberto Torres, operations and efficiency manager

The company determined that it needed a change, and that a call center on demand would be its best bet.

“In the cloud, we wouldn’t need a connection to a local carrier, which had given us problems in the past,” Torres said.

Ultimately, the company chose Five9’s call center on demand solution, a blended inbound/outbound platform with predictive dialing and many other features Englishtown hadn’t had before, including call recording, reporting tools, IVR functionality, and scalability. The company reports that the installation and implementation were accomplished very quickly, and it has noticed dramatic changes.

Visibility into agent behavior identified slow performers and pinpointed the causes. Predictive dialing caused a 40 percent boost in the number of outbound calls made each day, from 140 to 200. Agents also gained the ability to dial prospects with a simple mouse click without leaving the Salesforce environment, another critical boost to productivity. Recording calls and reporting functionality took the contact center into the twenty-first century, and Englishtown is now better able to troubleshoot problems and identify what’s working and what’s not.

“With our old system, agents often got frustrated because they would make a lot of calls before getting someone on the line,” Zamora said. “Now they reach a live person faster and spend the bulk of their time helping clients.”

Helping clients rather than struggling with an outdated contact center platform should be what contact centers spend all their time doing. On-demand call center solutions can help SMBs get there.