As today's business landscape continues to change and expand, the call center industry has made a shift to more and more virtual contact centers. These feature-rich software as a service call centers support agents located at home, onshore and off shore and provide them with a solution that takes away the relevancy of their physical location.

 

While the virtual call center has been around for a while, business decision makers now understand the real value and flexibility hosted services provide, and are turning to the virtual call center.

 

The virtual call center is also beneficial because it can be quickly deployed and there is no need for on-site hardware or IT staff. Instead, businesses get 24/7 reliable service that can be billed as a monthly or annual expense and leaves room for building additional call center capabilities on demand. Not only does this make the call center a more affordable and predictable expense for the business, but it also offers the flexibility if needed for businesses to enter and exit when the businesses, seasons, or staffing requirements change.

 

The virtual call center is being used in a number of industries today including financial services, telecommunications, retail, professional services, and outsourcers of contact centers.

 

In the telecommunications industry, the virtual call center is used for customer outreach, win backs, and promotional campaigns. For non-profits it makes possible fundraising, polling, and community alerts/broadcasts.

 

Also in the financial services sector, the virtual contact center is used for self-service consumer payments, and credit and collections management for example. While in the healthcare insurance industry the virtual call center provides registration, claim status and appointment setup.

 

Marketing services are also use the virtual call center for outbound calling, customer surveys, and campaign promotions.

 

Hosted contact center solutions provider Five9 offers the Five9 Virtual Call Center Suite to provide companies with all the virtual call center benefits they seek.

 

Specifically, the company has worked to provide virtual call center offerings for Vonage (News - Alert) , USCB (United States Credit Bureau), ARC (American Ramp Company), Bitstop Network Services, Purple Heart Service Foundation, Creative Logix, Debt Procurement Corporation, North American Handico, Channel Blend,  and First Funds.

 

Included in the Virtual Call Center Suite is Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) & Skills-Based Routing so calls are routed to the right queue and given priority, as well as the Five9 Predictive Dialer to allow the call center to comply with regulations as well as improve productivity.

 

IVR, CTI (News - Alert), VoIP, quality monitoring and voice recording are also offered along with a number of other advanced features like voicemail that allows callers to leave voicemails for agents and Web integration APIs that can be used to send important contact history data for information on a call.  CLICK HERE for a full list of these features.

 

 

For more, be sure to also check out the Hosted Contact Center channel on TMCnet.\