In 2006, iPass acquired another mobile connectivity company, GoRemote Internet Communications. Naturally, the company needed to integrate the two customer service centers.
“When we first transitioned to
Contactual, the savings represented a 33 percent gain over our old in-house system,' said Jeanine Stephens, IT director for iPass, in a customer case study posted to Contactual’s (News - Alert) Web site. 'Our savings have now grown to 50 percent with the increased number of agents we’ve hired in the past two years.”
But when they acquired GoRemote, 'iPass (News - Alert) ran its customer service call center through our in-house BIOS switch and Automated Call Distribution system,' Stephens remembered. 'We also used an outsourced call center to handle a portion of our inbound calls. We had 12 agents worldwide and with the acquisition, the number grew to 70.'
Stephens said they considered bringing all these agents in house 'and expanding our infrastructure. That would have been quite a challenge for us, and a substantial investment in hardware, labor, maintenance, licenses and such. We decided not to go that route.'
Wisely so. Instead, they searched for a virtual call center solution 'that would allow us to handle customer service calls through our four remote office locations, our outsourced call center and our home-based agents worldwide.”
They wanted a virtual call center solution that would enable them to consolidate metrics. They wanted all agents on one reporting system. 'We also wanted to be able to share best practices among supervisors of agent teams worldwide, and we knew that having one call center with a common monitoring and recording system would facilitate that,' Stephens explained. 'We also needed flexibility, so we could add teams from outsourced vendors to our virtual call center without being locked into their infrastructure.”
They settled on virtual call center solutions provider Contactual, and feel they made the right choice. Stephens: 'Contactual’s real-time monitoring gives us complete visibility into our call center operations around the globe. It gives us the metrics our supervisors need to manage their agent teams and ensure quality customer service.'
Monitoring agents in real time, Stephens says 'our supervisors can see statistics on service levels vs. goals, the number of calls waiting or in progress, and so on. They can see status graphs that show the percentage of time an agent spends on calls, waiting, wrapping up a call or on a work break. Contactual makes it so easy for our supervisors to see the agent groups -- who is active and who is not.”
To learn more about Contactual’s virtual call center software, OnDemand Contact Center,
click here.