A study performed by CallFire has shown that interest in at-home Virtual Call Center services has “nearly doubled” in the first week of operation of 2009.
Evidently weekly sales inquiries for at-home virtual call centers have increased year over year by over 52 percent. CallFire’s new user sign up rate for Loan Officers, MLM agents and Insurance agents has also shown a 33 percent increase.
CallFire provides Web-based predictive dialing and contact management tools for at-home salespeople “who need to contact thousands of businesses,” according to the CallFirers. You don’t need First Coffee to tell you that Americans have chosen to supplement household income by embracing MLM and other work-from-home opportunities.
As you would expect, then, this interest has resulted in what CallFire officials characterize as “a noted increase in sales inquiries for Virtual Call Center services.”
“Fluctuations of interest in Virtual Call Center products are a good barometer of our economic environment,” thinks Dinesh Ravishanker, CallFire CEO and co-founder.
The company has released a free iPhone (News - Alert) application called FriendCast. Salespeople using FriendCast can send personal voice messages to many clients: “The ad-supported service eliminates the time and hassle of making many phone calls and typing lengthy text messages while driving,” company officials say, explaining that iPhone users can send a free voice-recorded personal message to many of their contacts at once.
When FriendCast was released last month, TMC’s Jessica Kostek reported that the product “even offers an API interface for software developers.”
With CallFire's voice broadcast, Kostek said, CallFire can “quickly broadcast your GOTV political calls, emergency notification, outbound sales and government calls.”
FriendCast was described by company officials at the time of its release as “a free service which allows people to send a voice-recorded personal message to various contacts simultaneously.” It can be downloaded from the iPhone App Store.
Once installed, users simply register their phone number and select “record” to begin recording a personalized message.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David's articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi