Virtual Contact Center

Sure, if you outsource your call center to India or the Philippines you'll save money. But you might be sacrificing essential quality, and for "essential quality" read "customers".

 

Last year industry observer Kathleen Kiley wrote that, worried about cultural differences and possible lost sales, "many companies are relocating call centers domestically."

 

"With foreign-based call centers, U.S. companies are losing sales and customers," Esteban Kolsky, research director at Gartner told Kiley. Cost savings have been a big incentive to outsource, Kolsky noted, "but the culture clash is a big reason call center jobs are coming back."

 

96 percent of customers surveyed for a recent study state that a positive/good experience with a call center agent would increase their sense of brand loyalty. Read that number again, ninety-six percent. When's the last time 96 percent of anybody surveyed agreed on anything except free ice cream?

 

But there is a way many companies have used to maintain the quality of service American consumers expect when they call in with a question while lowering the costs of a full-fledged call center, with lights and desks and coffee and all sorts of overhead expenses: Virtual call centers.

 

Virtual contact centers are where calls are routed to home-based agents, who pay for their own lights and coffee. We can build them. We have the technology, which usually is only a broadband connection and a telephone -- which the employee pays for. Benefits are few, and in some cases the employee actually pays for his own training.

 

It's been a growing industry for the past few years. "After a slow start, the emerging virtual call center (or contact center) industry is showing signs of real growth," industry observer Toni Kistner wrote in 2003.

 

The Miami Herald reports that the ranks of today's 112,000 virtual call center agents is expected to grow over 20 percent annually "as companies continue to move work away from traditional brick-and-mortar call centers to lower-cost centers that tap into workers' homes."

 

And using virtual agents isn't just a jerry-rig answer for smaller companies who can't afford call centers, unless your idea of smaller companies includes Sears, 1-800-Flowers, Office Depot, Verizon, J. Crew, Virgin Atlantic Airlines, the IRS and local AAA auto clubs.

 

SearchCRM tells of My Twinn, a high-end doll manufacturer, who switched to virtual agents a few years ago. That year, "30 percent more inquiry calls were converted to orders, employee turnover decreased 88 percent, and 90 percent fewer calls had to be escalated" compared to the previous year.

 

Virtual agents also make a lot of sense for companies whose business is highly seasonal, where paying for an empty building doesn't make a lot of sense -- My Twinn uses over 400 customer support employees during the Christmas season, and 25 the rest of the year.

 

Few operations use solely home-based agents, one common arrangement is to have calls going first to a home-based agent, and when those lines are full, rolling over to an Indian call center.

 

 

David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page.