Anytime you call 1-800 anything you are calling a call center. Your call might be directed to Salt Lake City, to the Philippines or to India, but it is likely going to a brick and mortar facility at a great expense to the company at hand. A call center is any sort of telephony operation handling the sales, customer service, inbound or outbound needs of a company. When a company forms and realizes it requires these services fulfilled, up until recently it had very few options.
Forming one's own brick and mortar call center is a labor and cost-intensive program. Here are a few of the steps involved; renting the facility, leasing the hardware, insuring that hardware, hiring the workers and supervisors, training them, the list goes on. The process might take up to 3 months to even initiate an operation with massive expenditures at stake.
Companies like West Interactive realized this dilemma for businesses and created the first of the call center solutions - the outsourced call center. Outsourced call centers gave new flexibility and ease of entrance because they assumed the overhead, opened the facility, hired and trained workers. A company would call up and say, I need one representative answering calls from 9-5, handling sales and returns inquiries and transactions. West would say, we're happy to service you, send over the proper script and all other information to familiarize our worker on your company and we'll get them talking - for approximately $1.85 per minute.
The most recent call center solution dawned with the advent of VOIP – voice over Internet protocol technology. VOIP allows for remote locations of Teleworkers, which means the ability of a home-based worker operation. With reduced long
distance pricing and the removal of such overhead like the brick and mortar, savings are quite tremendous. For only $99 per monthly seat plus 10-30 cents a minute for direct labor, the economics are clear and drastic. Companies like Freedom TeleWork (www.freedomtelework.com) have created solutions just this revolutionary.
With an online solution there is far greater ease and speed of sign up – choose a plan depending on calling preferences, B2C (Predictive Dialing) or B2B (Progressive Dialing), select and train TeleWorkers, load script which will merge with contact information, and your Organization is ready to roll out a highly advanced and drastically cost-efficient call center operation.
Clearly, the immediate savings and return on investment for a company are quite substantial. Virtual Call centers are revamping the accessibility and return on investment for companies' customer relations across the globe.
Jennifer Hannah Gross is Vice President for Marketing and works at Freedom Telework Inc., a virtual call center company that offers hosted call center solutions and services such as progressive dialing, inbound call center, chat, predictive dialing, and many more.
