Source: www.voip-news.com

Ramshyam Communications Limited has lowered its prices in hope so drawing more small businesses to take advantage of their call center outsourcing services.

“Ramshyam has lowered its offshore call center fees because we feel strongly about supporting our existing and future clients during these difficult times,” stated Sandeep Periwal, founder and CEO of Ramshyam Communications Limited. “Yes, it will have an effect on our own profits, but the current economic climate in the U.S. requires businesses to take drastic measures to keep their margins intact. That can only be achieved by reducing costs, and that’s where Ramshyam Communications Limited steps in.”

The Mumbai-based company offers a full range of call center services, including phone support, e-mail answering, and live chat support

“Customer service and strong business ethics have always been the cornerstones of Ramshyam Communications Limited’s offshore call center services,” said Periwal. “Lowering our prices to help our clients pull through a recession period is the most obvious way we can make sure our customer service and business ethics are the best in the call center industry. Lowered call center expenses free up our clients’ resources to focus on keeping their businesses viable right now.”

Source: www.voip-news.com

LiveOps has been awarded a 2008 IP Contact Center Technology Pioneer Award by TMC’s Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine for its LiveOps On-Demand Call Center Platform.

“We are proud to be recognized as a leader in call center technology by one of the premier publications in the call center industry,” said Maynard Webb, CEO of LiveOps. “This accomplishment is a result of our continued commitment to developing innovative call center technology that delivers flexibility, agility and breakthrough call center results to our customers.”

LiveOps On-Demand Call Center Platform is a hosted IP telephony platform. It uses cutting-edge VoIP to manage and deploy virtual call centers, connecting callers and agents on both standard TDM networks and advanced IP networks.

“LiveOps has proven to our editorial team at Customer Interaction Solutions that the LiveOps On-Demand Call Center Platform is a groundbreaking IP contact center technology. It has been designed with the needs of the contact center market in mind and the scalability and flexibility of IP behind it,” said Nadji Tehrani, Executive Group Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Customer Interaction Solutions. “With technology as the key to the success of any call center, it is my pleasure to recognize LiveOps for bringing advanced, pioneering technologies to market while providing high quality and superior applications.”

Source: www.voip-news.com

Switching to a VoIP call center might be convenient, but you need to make sure you maintain quality control. Having polite, friendly call center reps is important, but so is having the right resources and tracking performance.

According to VoIP News:

Most companies simply don’t have the on-site manpower, expertise and technical resources to keep constant tabs on the ongoing performance of their agents and network. In fact, a recent study by The Taylor Reach Group reported that 60 percent of organizations surveyed said that in the past six months, they experienced at least one month where they failed to meet the standard number of monitors required by their organization.

For a good resource on maintaining quality control at your VoIP call center, check out this article on VoIP News.

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

Microsoft will be investing in Aspect Software just to make sure that Call Center hole in it’s Unified Communications products filled. Aspect Software is used in multi member call centers. In return for investments by Microsoft, Aspect will make sure that it’s products will inter operate with Microsoft’s unified communications products. Aspect is so excited that even adapted the Apollo 11 Moon Landings famous line ""That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind"", of course changed to match their mission, taking a step together.
Aspect expects that this alliance creates benefits for businesses and their customers alike, including:

• Enhanced and accelerated customer-company and inter- and intra-company interactions, helping businesses improve the customer experience and reduce costs
• Improved sales, service and collections processes and increased opportunities for first call resolution through the use of presence with instant messaging and voice to match customers with the right resources – inside and outside the contact center
• Simplified deployment, management and propagation of applications through a standards-based software approach to unified communications for the contact center

To Learn more about Aspect Unified IP and their approach to Unified Communications for the Contact Center, visit Aspect here.

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

While many have found novel uses for Skype, at home and else where, call center VoIP solution is not one of them. While Skype is tied with cheaper calls to anywhere, when people think of a call center, skype does not alway ring a bell!.
Even though the quality can be highly variable, depending on the quality of your Internet connection, and dropped calls may become an issue. But the price is right, and the integration is easy, with services like OnState, Web-based service allows instant sign-up, online setup of skills-based call routing, Skype remains a plausible candidate for a call center solution.
Read more at VoIP News’ article by Robert Poe.

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

As Voice Over IP (VoIP) telephone systems are gaining rapid acceptance in everywhere, call centers too joins the adaption of technology. But when a call center changes over to VoIP, they need to upgrade their recording system as well, which can be costly and may cost as much as $1,000 per agent.

But VirtualLogger has come forward to make it easier by selling a "pay as you go" VoIP recording service by waiving all setup charges for VoIP recording in call centers of 100 agents or more. "This amounts to a savings of up to $200 per agent. And, it means that a center could be recording for less than $5 per agent per month," company officials say.

Under the new program, VirtualLogger will provide and install software to record VoIP calls as required by the client, including data captured from other sources, such as CTI or CRM systems.

The program is named 2008 VOIP Recording JumpStart. Under its terms, setup charges are waived for the core recording service, and also for VirtualScore. This can amount to as much as $200 per agent, depending on the services selected by the client. Depending on contract length and size, then, a center could be recording for less than $5 per agent per month.
Info Source

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

QueueMetrics is a tool you should have at your hand if you are running Call Center based on Asterisk. With over 150 quantitative metrics available your call center problems are easily discovered. You can also measure budget targets, any promised SLA targets, various agent activities, realtime agents and center analysis and with a level of details that goes down to listening to any call on any queue, all this right from your browser.

There a few different versions based on the licenses are available. QueueMetrics is a commercial product which license is bound to the number of concurrent agents you have in your call center. QueueMetrics is free to use and experiment with if you have up to two agents.

I did try the free version and I did not have a real call center but was able to test on my Asterisk development server. I was able to see most of the stuff promised by the QM and some of the tests did not work properly due to my server configuration.

Following is a list of tools that QM could provide call center operators;

If you are a Operations manager;

• See a very detailed report of call center activity, down to each call on each queue.
• Run reports by single queues, or by user-created queue groups, both on inbound and outbound traffic.
• Listen to recorded calls.
• See activity statistics and duration by call stage, with daily, hourly (or shorter), weekly breakdowns.
• Can track calls processed on multiple queues.
• Measure business targets and conversion rates on a number of industry-standard metrics.
• Measure agent activity during the day, both on ACD and non-ACD time, with billable and non-billable times.
• Excellent configurable security and privacy, on a queue-by-queue basis. All actions can be assigned or revoked on an user-by-user basis.
• QueueMetrics can be easily setup to support a virtual or multi-tenant call-center.

And those who are Team leaders;

• Very detailed real time call and agent reporting, can be broken down by queue, agent group or location.
• See agent status and real-time activity.
• Remotely listen to live calls as they are handled.
• Watch agent screens remotely through a VNC client.
• Real-time wallboard mode using a video projector.
• Restricted "Visitor" mode to allow real-time access to external stakeholders, with optional live call or VNC monitoring.

Even for Agents them selves;

• Agents can see the calls they?re handling and integrate with external CRM apps, optionally passing data gathered from IVR menus or Caller-ID.
• Set call status codes (e.g. Sale, Contact?) for all inbound and outbound traffic through the GUI
• Log-on, log-off, go on pause and set pause reason codes.

Finally those guys responsible for keep those servers running;

• Proven, heavy-duty industrial solutions deployed in hundreds of locations worldwide, from 5 to 500 agents - ask for references.
• Highly scalable - supports Asterisk clusters and can be installed on separate servers.
• Supports database and flat-file storage.
• Minimal or no Asterisk interaction to minimize the load on the Asterisk server.
• No need to patch or modify an existing Asterisk installation.
• Works with Asterisk’s or external call recording and storage components.
• Easily scriptable through its XML-RPC interface.
• Auto-configuration form standard Asterisk configuration files.
• Easy to install and upgrade using the yum package manager.

So all these and more information is available here. Give the Demo version a test and see if it is suitable for your call center.

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

The one-year anniversary of the Innovative Communications Alliance between Microsoft and Nortel Networks on July 16 will be a short-lived celebration, as both vendors quickly go back to work on further extensions to their VOIP-focused partnership.

Both vendors claim that in a year’s time, the joint Unified Communications initiative has resulted in 430,000 individual end-user licenses for joint offerings from over 100 customers in North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America.

At the same time, "Nortel now has more people trained on (Office Communications Server) than any other channel partner in the world," and it set a speed record for becoming a Microsoft Gold Certified partner in under six months, said Greg St. James, senior director of the Nortel Alliance at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash.

"No one else can as readily in any part of the world help customers optimize OCS and the PBX working together," he added. The two vendors chose to highlight the anniversary because they believe it is a departure from most industry alliances, which often result in little to no real advances for customers.

read more at eWeek article Nortel, Microsoft Show Results from VOIP Alliance

Source: voipcentral.org

Want to get rid of this widely spread carbon dioxide? Here are a few easy and interesting steps! All offices, especially workers of call centers are allowed for using VOIP from their home. It would dramatically cut down approximately thousand tones of Carbon dioxide.

According to a call center organizer, journey of around 460 million commuters is being done in UK annually. This intense journey results in the generation of approximately 1.3 million tones of CO2.

Planting trees is another solution of getting rid of constantly growing CO2. But, this solution is hard to achieve, as it requires a Kent size forest. According to the Ian Ashby, chief executive of Exony, “It’s staggering to think that an area of forest nearly the size of Kent would be required to offset the UK contact centre industry’s commute.”

She also added, “Homeshoring would significantly reduce the amount of traffic on our roads and enable a whole new segment of the population to use their skills beneficially.”

Via: Telappliant

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

Another open source Asterisk based has come to bloom at 1bizcom. The open source software based 1bizCom is next generation web-based, multi-tenant, distributed, mulit-lingual, inbound, outbound Video enabled VoIP & VVoIP call/ contact center solution for Asterisk with Built-in phone, IVR, CRM, Predictive dialer, ACD, Chat, Mail, Fax, Video and other features.
The system runs on Windows IIs web server and the MySQL data base could reside on a Linux server if preferred. The system is in beta and the current version seems to be 0.8.0.0b1 and the application package is known as 1bC.
According to the 1bizcom site;

1BizCom has all the salient features which goes beyond with new creations like efficient call handling, Automatic Call Routing (ACD), Voice Logging/Recording, Authentication, Conferencing, Data base screen pops, Answering machine detection with detailed statistics and reporting for reduced response time, improved customer experience and quality management of the operations. 1BizCom is a highly scalable Call Center Solution supporting three-dimensional scalability, which will enable client to scale up and optimize the operations as per changing requirements with vendor independence. 1Bizcom helps users to take care of the entire value chain and continuously work on processes & help to generate value at peak places.
Exclusive Features

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)
Call handling features
Call connection notification on the screen
Call transfer, Call Conferencing, 3rd party verifications
Voice Logging, Monitoring
Call Detail Record (CDR) and Reporting
Web based solution
Maintaining call history

I have not tested the application, due to the fact that builds were pulled off by the developer. The developer left the following message on the Sourceforge Forum;
"Thanks for outstanding support that has been landed to 1bizcom since its lauch few days back…Unfortunately, due to some critical issues, I have to pull the builds…But, please note that we are highly motivated by the initial community support landed and we are firm to provide you a very strong collaborative open source platform.
Please, give us some time and we will get you an improved version of the software very soon. "

But if you are handy with subversion, it is possible to grab the application and the code. See the links bellow. But I will watch out as the developer might have had a good reason to pull out the build.

I have gone through the demo provided on the side and I feel that his Asterisk add on has clear long path ahead.

Links;
1bizcom site
Sourceforge project
1bizcom SVN at Sourceforge

Source: voipcentral.org

Foreseeing VoIP being ready for its large-scale adoption in the Contact Centers around the world, The CTI Group has offered the first ever call recording solution SmartRecord IP to this sector.

Undeniably, call recording is the most vital tool of a contact center. The credibility of a call center largely depends upon its call recording system as it facilitates proper call procedures and enables supervisors to train and coach individuals as well as provide reference of transactions.

With hosted VoIP dominating the mainstream, the call centers are inclined to adopt hosted VoIP to serve distribution centers while cutting costs.

However, ensuring secure call recording is a major challenge for the call centers. On the face of it, SmartRecord IP is the best solution.

Besides contact centers, the SmartRecord IP finds its potential market in the legal fields where statement recording assumes vital part of the entire proceedings.

Read