TMCnet News
Hosted service can cut in-house costs(Business Day (South Africa) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Hosted service can cut in-house costs A HOSTED on-demand contact centre service set up by Intelleca gives call-centre operators access to technology infrastructure and telecommunication services using voice over IP (VoIP). With this type of service there is no capital expenditure, monthly charges are based on volume usage and no in-house technology skills are required, says CEO Mike Renzon. We have been running the service for a year and are servicing four call centres that have between 50 to 100 agent seats. He says the delivery platform was set up using the CosmoCom technology solution. It is housed at Telkom's data centres and supports voice, e-mail, fax, video, SMS and web-chat interaction. The system provides automatic call distribution, computer telephony integration and an optional customer relationship management functionality. It also provides interactive voiceresponse functionality that can be customised to the requirement of each call centre, he says. When customer calls come in the system identifies the number dialled and routes it to call-centre agents wherever they are located, based on predetermined parameters, says Renzon. While the agent is interacting with customers his PC screen is populated automatically with the information he needs to assist them, he says. Outbound calls can be accommodated on the hosted platform, for example to support marketing campaigns and follow up customer service, says Renzon. It also supports predictive dialling, whereby the system runs through a database, dials the customer and connects the agent once the line is free, says Renzon. New agents are set up on the system with their user profiles and rules on how calls are synchronised and escalated to a higher authority, he says. Monthly rental is based on the number of agents and the functionality required, and call charges are billed directly to the call centre by the telecommunications service provider, he says. Renzon says if required Intelleca will install the CosmoCom solution in-house and manage it. |