Virtual Call Center

In many industries, a new and exciting trend is afoot: moving away from location-centric business operations to mobile workforces being empowered to serve customers no matter where they, or the customers, are located. This trend is affecting many, many service-oriented industries. One of those is the call and contact center market. New technology that enables people to work from remote locations has created a new type of entity: the virtual call center.

 

Why should a company consider setting up a virtual call center? There are a number of advantages to this type of setup, which utilizes the concept of telecommuting and combines it with next-generation networking technology like Sentillion vBusiness’ vThere desktop virtualization suite. Below are four key positives of setting up a virtual call center.

 

 

Operating a virtual call center is, in many cases, less expensive and more cost-effective than running a centrally-located center. This is because, once the system is in place, the coordination and administration associated with running a large office is eliminated. Workers can get right to work; meetings can get started on time (no more waiting for someone who is stuck in rush-hour traffic), and more energy overall can be devoted to the real task at hand: providing excellent customer service.

 

Today, VoIP technology has greatly reduced the cost of enabling virtual call center agents to stay in touch with the central office. A solution like vThere further cuts down on costs by offering an affordable, easily manageable, secure method for connecting agents to the corporate network.

 

 

Quality call center agents have one thing in mind each day: get down to the work of doing their jobs. Empowering agents, through a virtual call center, to work remotely from home or a location near their home, cuts down on the time and energy agents spend each day not working, but getting to and from work. This means agents can, in a nutshell, be more efficient and give the company they work for more value.

 

As mentioned above, running a virtual call center is, in many cases, simply more efficient than requiring all agents to report to a central location to do their jobs. Plus, a virtual call center lets companies efficiently stagger agents in different time zones to respond to variations in call volume, without having to coordinate several centers around the country. Talk about efficiency!

 

 

Customers, quite simply, want to talk to call center agents who are friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable. They also want to have their questions addressed in a timely manner, preferably through first call resolution. How can a virtual call center help make all this possible? By helping ensure that the best agent to answer a given question is available when he or she is needed. Setting up a virtual call center gives companies a new level of flexibility to hire the best agents; agents who may have specialized knowledge or live in advantageous time zones, but would not be able to report to the central office.

 

 

Redundancy is a key word in emergency preparedness: there must be backup systems in place in the event that the primary one is compromised or taken out of commission. Putting all the eggs in one basket, as it were, by centralizing all call center agents in the same building is a somewhat dangerous proposition. What happens if there is a fire in that building, or a terrorist attack, or a hurricane, or some other event that necessitates evacuation? How will customers be served if agents can’t get to the phone to answer calls?

 

The answer is a virtual call center. In this scenario, agents are geographically dispersed so that, even if some agents in a particular region are unable to work (for example, because of a power outage) the entire operation doesn’t come to a standstill. Instead, additional agents in unaffected areas can be called upon to keep things running.

 

As is evidenced here, virtual call centers offer many advantages. To learn more, visit the Virtual Call Center channel, sponsored by Sentillion vBusiness, on TMCnet.com.

 

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