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Cloud Contact Center Solutions Eliminate Geographic Barriers
Hosted Contact Center Featured Article

Cloud Contact Center Solutions Eliminate Geographic Barriers

October 01, 2014

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By Tracey E. Schelmetic,
TMCnet Contributor

The twenty-first century contact center is able to do many things that would have seemed like magic a decade or two ago. Thanks to hosted contact center solutions, even smaller companies today have feature sets available to them that were once an option only for large, well-funded customer support centers, such as analytics, speech recognition, 100 percent call recording, workforce optimization and multichannel integration.


One of the most compelling features of the hosted contact center platform, however, has been its ability to change the way companies operate geographically. Premise-based solutions once tied contact centers to a single brick-and-mortar location, which had limiting implications when it came to hiring. Contact centers were limited to a labor pool that was a reasonable commuting distance from the physical facility. For this reason, they were often limited to 9:00 to 5:00 schedules, unless they wanted to take on the onerous task of managing second and third shifts, which drives up overhead considerably. Once a local labor pool was tapped out of good candidates, companies were stuck hiring less-than-desirable candidates out of sheer necessity, which drove up training costs.

Thanks to the hosted contact center platform of today, however, no such geographic limitations exist, according to a recent blog post by cloud contact center solutions provider Five9 (News - Alert).

“[Today], you can recruit and onboard agents located just about anywhere in the world,” wrote Five9. “This is particularly helpful if you need agents with specific expertise that might not be common within commuting distance to your office.”

Home-based agents or those located in remote offices need only a headset, a PC and a high-speed Internet connection to be up and running quickly on the contact center platform. Provisioning a new agent can take just minutes, and modern cloud contact center software is easy for agents to navigate, learn and use–so they’re up to speed quickly and easily, according to Five9.

Home-based or remote agents working on the cloud contact center platform may not be physically present, but they are present from a technology standpoint. A good solution allows managers and supervisors to monitor agent activity and listen in on recorded calls, just as if they were based on the premises. Managers can coach and train agents through a variety of channels. (This is particularly true if the company also employs a cloud-based workforce optimization solution).

“With cloud contact center software, supervisors and managers can track agent and campaign metrics with ease–so you can ensure your new hires (and veterans) are performing as wonderfully as you hoped,” wrote Five 9. 




Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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