The small business: It has been, and always will be, the bread and butter of our country’s economy. Small businesses are what make the U.S. strong. Not only do they create diversity in the marketplace and stimulate competition, they also serve as the main “test bed” for innovation, developing a majority of the new products and services that are successfully brought to market.


When a small business is suddenly faced with rapid spike in growth, it is often a simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying experience for the owners. Very often, small businesses (especially those which are “undercapitalized”) face a “make or break” point near the beginning of their evolution where they begin to grow rapidly, but then suddenly fail (or perhaps just “stagnate”) due to an inability to handle their growth.

One obstacle many fast-growing small businesses face is a lack of means for effectively conducting outbound sales/marketing campaigns and/or serving their customer base. For example, a small business with 10 employees which just received a list of thousands of leads – all of which need to be acted on ASAP – may face a challenge reaching the “next level” of growth if it does not have the phone system and related software in place enabling its agents to dial through all those leads in a reasonable time frame. For many of these small businesses, going out and purchasing an expensive and difficult-to-maintain on-premise call center system is not an option (whether it’s simply due to the high up-front cost of purchasing the equipment and software, or perhaps simply a lack of IT staff to support the system). Similarly, many small businesses will be resistant to the idea of outsourcing their customer service to a third party – either due the expense, or perhaps simply due to the “loss of control,” in terms of delivering “personalized service” to its customers. At the same time, having your company’s handful of agents manually dial all those numbers, using your “legacy” phone system, is simply not going to cut it – you’ve got to reach those leads while they’re hot!

Enter WebAstra, the affordable, full-featured Web-based call center solution from 3cLogic. Designed for the small business, this powerful on-demand VoIP call center system delivers many of the features and capabilities found on advanced, on-premise enterprise systems -- only for a fraction of the cost. Best of all, the system is fast and simple to deploy -- you can set it up in about 30 minutes! All you need is a broadband connection, some PCs and the phones, and you’re good to go!

Unlike other hosted call center solutions, WebAstra is a complete, turnkey solution offering advanced dialing, state-of-the-art VoIP communications and high speed broadband -- all as a tightly integrated package. Because it is delivered over the public Internet, there is no need to wait for additional lines or equipment – you can set the whole service up – and reconfigure it – all from a single, simple-to-use Web-based portal.

WebAstra is ideally suited to businesses which regularly conduct outbound campaigns: telemarketing, market research, debt collections, subscriptions sales, fundraising, time sharing, health care, insurance, mortgage, credit cards, service provider sales, political campaigns – even government agencies can use this software to deliver community alerts!

Arguably, the single biggest advantage of the WebAstra solution is its cost. One of the reasons hosted call center solutions like WebAstra are so attractive to small businesses is because they can be utilized on a “pay-as-you-go” basis. The service is analogous to a utility – you only pay for the amount you use. Unlike other hosted call center offerings where you are locked into a subscription and must pay based on the number of agents (or perhaps, if you are lucky, the number of seats) you signed up for, as well as the specific applications you are using, WebAstra offers much more flexible “pay-as-you-go” model, where the number of seats (i.e. licenses) can scaled up and down on an as-needed basis, and all of the software is included.

With WebAstra, you pay based on the amount of time (i.e. the number of minutes) you use the system, multiplied by the number of seats, thus making a very simple pricing scheme. The beauty of this model is that you can avoid all of the various “surprises” that can come up with an on-premise system: Because the whole system is managed and maintained by 3cLogic, you not only avoid the high cost of up-front licensing and equipment purchase and installation, you also don’t have to worry about bogging down your IT staff with time-consuming troubleshooting and maintenance after the system has been installed. Furthermore, you don’t have to worry about equipment failure or software glitches that will send you running in different directions for third party support. Instead, the service is a predictable cost which can be represented neatly as a recurring line item in your monthly operating budget.

So flexible is WebAstra’s pricing model that you can actually start, pause and stop agent shifts at the click of a button. Thus, WebAstra lets you scale up seats and minutes for short-term, high-volume campaigns -- and then reduce these for off-peak periods. The company offers three basic pricing packages covering your spectrum of usage.

Another huge advantage is the extreme scalability of the system. With WebAstra, you can rapidly scale from, say, a dozen seats, all the way up to hundreds of seats – practically with a click of the mouse. This makes it very easy for companies to scale their call center operations up and down, based on seasonal spikes and lulls (not to mention the occasional unforeseen event which can require that you bring on a small army of agents ASAP). Plus it saves companies a ton of money, because (once again) they only pay for the seats they are using.

The other huge advantage of the hosted delivery model is that it makes it incredibly easy to set up a “global call center” with call center agents spread out across the globe. Because WebAstra facilitates the “virtualized” call center, where all end-points on the network are equal, there’s no reason a small business couldn’t deploy agents all over the world. As long as each agent has a broadband connection, a PC and a phone, they can be located anywhere. Thus, the system gives small businesses the opportunity to capitalize on the “remote” or home-based” agent model, which is increasing in popularity thanks to the cost savings it delivers, not to mention the improved agent performance, and increased customer and agent satisfaction, which the remote agent model is becoming known for. Further, it enables businesses to make use of agents in countries which offer a favorable exchange rate, thus enabling a small company to easily outsource some of its call center work to remote agents in, say, India or the Philippines. In this regard, WebAstra is the call center system you “take everywhere.” You can deploy it on-site, at temporary facilities, at one of your agent’s homes – anyplace where there is high speed broadband.

And then, perhaps most impressively, there are all the advanced capabilities and features delivered by this system. First, WebAstra offers a choice of predictive, power and auto dialer software which come integrated with the platform. With these advanced dialing apps, small companies can radically increase agent productivity and efficiency. Where manual dialing often yields less than 15 minutes of talk time per hour, a power dialer can increase talk time to over 30 minutes. Meanwhile the sophisticated predictive dialer can dial ahead while skipping over bad numbers, voicemail and no-answers, providing as much as 45 minutes of talk time per hour.

WebAstra also offers advanced management and performance reporting capabilities which will allow you to identify agent performance problems and other operational problems – and then take corrective action. Using the system’s reporting tools, managers can find out how a particular agent is performing against the rest of the group; how effectively a new script is working; or perhaps determine the best times to do focus calling. Best of all, these tools provide visibility into contact center performance in near real-time.

The comprehensive platform also offers call recording and playback capabilities, allowing you to record calls and archive them or to monitor calls in real time. With the recording app, you can scroll through call detail records up to two months prior and review on demand. In addition, companies which provide outsourced services can let their clients listen in on calls too.

Other essential features include supervisor barge-in and support, which lets call center managers intervene on calls which are going “sour” – or perhaps come on the line just to provide some additional information or support. As part of this, the system facilitates “whisper coaching,” where only the agent can hear what the supervisor is saying, not the customer. This feature also lets agents transfer calls to other agents, as well as to conference with multiple parties. WebAstra also offers outbound IVR and messaging capabilities which let organizations dial out IVR messages with a keypad option to speak with an agent. If the outbound call happens to hot someone’s voicemail, it can be set to play a standard message. Also key is the system’s Easy Leads Upload and Storage feature, which simplifies the management of lists for outbound campaigns. With this you can store and manage up to 250,000 leads on the WebAstra portal – enough space to spare you from the hassle of having to constantly import/export lists.

Finally, there is WebAstra’s 24/7 support. Although WebAstra is designed to be the most reliable and simple to use hosted call center system ever, there will always be those occasional times where support is needed. The company’s support team draws on its decades of experience working for some of the top service providers and applications developers in the U.S.

To learn more about WebAstra, visit www.3clogic.com.

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Patrick Barnard is Assignment Editor for TMCnet and Associate Editor for Customer Interaction Solutions magazine. To see more of his articles, please visit Patrick Barnard’s columnist page.

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