Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Verizon Business, a unit of Verizon Communications, has opened a new contact center in Tulsa, Oklahoma to accommodate growing demand for its outsourced end-user help desk services.

 

The new facility, which has room for up to 400 highly-trained support reps, more than doubles Verizon Business’s help desk operations capacity and it enhances system redundancy. Verizon Business’s other contact center is in Tampa, Florida.

 

The demand for these services is being driven by a growth in the number of professionals working remotely, and who require support to stay in touch with their offices, to better serve customers, and to boost productivity.

 

It is more challenging for enterprises to support out-of-office staff than those on premises. A Gartner study, Teleworkers Settle Less for Service and Support, cited in Home Workplace, a how-to book on teleworking, found that home and mobile workers experienced service gaps, such as long bouts of downtime, unless they seek help from colleagues. When they did receive service the quality was high.

 

The paper recommended that CIOs and CFOs make supporting remote employees a priority, that support desks track help requests from dispersed staff separately from those of other employees. It also suggested considering outsourcing internal support to fill service gaps, such as after-hours.

 

The Verizon Business outsourced help desks resolve issues with e-mail, Internet access, personal computers and offer support for handheld devices such as a BlackBerry. They also manage issues such as with hardware and software applications. Services also can be customized to meet an organization's specific IT support goals and objectives, with a choice of English and Spanish language capabilities.

 

Verizon Business’ services include data center collocation, remote backup and restore, hosted and instant messaging, IT service desk, Akamai services, IP application hosting, and remote IP application management.

 

"We strive to go above and beyond for our customers, especially in the growing area of IT services support," said Michael Marcellin, Verizon Business’s vice president of product marketing. "In this case, it's about exceeding — not meeting — customer requirements as we launch this new center and work to increase customer satisfaction and productivity. We are providing enterprise customers with an invaluable resource for seamlessly extending their IT departments."