The operational efficiencies and other benefits to be gained by integrating geographically-dispersed call centers into a “virtual call center” environment are becoming too great for organizations to ignore.
According to a recent report from call center market research firm ContactBabel (News - Alert) “joining multisite contact center operations together into a single 'virtual' contact center has brought significant benefits to both businesses and their customers.”
The firm’s “US Contact Center Decision-Makers' Guide,” sponsored by CosmoCom (News - Alert), reveals that companies that have implemented virtual contact centers have experienced increased operational efficiency and service levels. Of the 200 contact center operational leaders that participated, nearly three quarters (72 percent) cited the “ability to smooth out call spikes by balancing the load between contact centers as the top benefit, followed closely by reduced wait times, wider ranges of skills available to callers, and overall cost savings between sites.”
With virtual contact center technology, call volume can be distributed evenly across all agent locations (including home-based agents). Thus it is ideal for organizations that have extended service hours by having centers in multiple times zones and utilizing a “follow the sun” approach to customer service. With a virtual call center, there is no hard switch over to the next center in the next time zone – instead call volume can be shifted intelligently, gradually and in balanced fashion from one center to the next, as the system enables far greater flexibility and control over call routing compared to legacy systems.
What’s more, the virtual call center model gives organizations the ability to allocate agents when and where needed. This affords better agent utilization and reduces the chance of having agents sitting around idly, waiting for contacts to come in.
In addition, having a distributed contact center that makes use of remote or home-based agents drastically increases the size of the agent candidate pool, thus making it easier for companies to recruit and hire top talent, including agents with specific technical and language skills.
A majority of the respondents to the survey agreed that there is also significant savings on call costs between physical sites when going the virtual call center route.
Of the survey respondents with multiple-site contact centers that had not yet virtualized their operations, 61 percent agreed that their main concern was the management of teams across multiple locations.
'The best virtual contact center technologies allow multiple operations or even homeworkers to be linked together so as to be viewed and managed as a single mega-site,” said the report's author, Steve Morrell, in a release. “This allows significant economies of scale and improvements in performance to take place, without the attendant problems around environment, morale and attrition that plague many very large operations. Our research shows that those businesses which have taken the virtualization route have usually found very significant cost and performance benefits.'
Patrick Barnard is a senior Web editor for TMCnet, covering call and contact center technologies. He also compiles and regularly contributes to TMCnet e-Newsletters in the areas of robotics, IT, M2M, OCS and customer interaction solutions. To read more of Patrick's articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by Patrick Barnard