Source: www.voip-news.com

There are hosted software and service solutions for contact call centers now available from TASterix.

“Hosted solutions are inevitable,” said Vince McGlone, CEO of TASterix. “And with Infradapt’s voice and data infrastructure as well as their telephony expertise, TASterix will be able to provide a myriad of hosted applications inclusive of 24-hour business continuity with real-time failsafe mechanisms in place throughout Infradapt’s national network.” McGlone continues, “Our relationship with Infradapt is what separates us from other vendors since we are providing a true Unified Telecom Solution which merges voice, data, and software.”

Here’s the detes and perks:

The TASterix-Infradapt Hosted Solutions offered are:

– Answering Service Solutions with Resource Sharing
– Traditional PBX
– Inbound Call Center – Help Desk
– Outbound Call Center w/ predictive dialing
– CRM fully integrated with Asterisk (Sugar CRM, etc.)

Hosted solutions offer many benefits, including:

– Flexibility — Services are able to easily move offices or agents
without moving phone lines or platform equipment.
– Scalability — The large-scale carrier infrastructure allows a service
to quickly scale to more lines when needed.
– Dependability — 24/7 Monitoring, power-protection, fire suppression,
carrier and facility redundancy are just some of the many advantages
to a Tier-1 data center.
– Quality — The carrier-grade voice infrastructure delivers reliable
service without suffering from any of the limitations of retail Voice
over IP (VoIP) offerings.
– No Maintenance — Because the services are delivered “on demand” from
Infradapt’s infrastructure cloud, there is no individual service
maintenance or downtime.

“Hosted solutions are here to stay and I am excited about being an integral part of the TASterix-Infradapt Alliance,” states Steve Michaels of TAS Marketing, the sales and marketing branch for TASterix solutions.

Source: www.voip-news.com

Get behind the scenes and see what call centers really look like…

The ICMI Contact Center Management Conference & Expo is coming next month in Austin, Texas. Scheduled for June 1-3, the conference will include call center tours with guides from International Customer Management Institute to explain the whole thing.

“This will be the first ICMI conference that will offer Call Center Tours each day of the event,” said Joy Sobhani, ICMI Conference Program Director. “Our attendees have continually voiced their interest in having multiple time slots to choose from as they consider these site tours to be a major highlight of their conference experience.”

According to ICMI:

Call Center Tours will include:

Harte Hanks

The Harte-Hanks Response Management Austin – Wells Branch is one of Harte-Hanks’ three Austin locations, and the second largest in its global contact center operations. The facility currently houses upwards of 700 contact center seats and provides a broad range of inbound customer care, tier one and tier two technical support, and outbound telesales solutions for a number of the nation’s premier consumer electronics, gaming systems, and consumer package goods manufacturers.

American Cancer Society

The National Cancer Information Center (NCIC) operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, empowering constituents to prevent, manage and survive cancer. The NCIC is a unit of the American Cancer Society (ACS), which is a nationwide, community-based, voluntary health organization dedicated to eliminating cancer as a major health problem. NCIC employs approximately 600 staff, with over 60 specialists supporting constituents in a work-at-home capacity. Specialists engage with constituents via inbound/outbound phone, email and chat, handling 1 million inbound calls, 50,000 email messages, and more than 100,000 outbound contacts annually.

Employees Retirement System of Texas

This Texas state agency administers benefit programs including retirement and insurance benefits for all State of Texas employees, retirees and their families. With $22.3 billion in assets and 343,000 members, ERS is the 54th largest pension fund in the U.S. and the 33rd largest public pension fund. ERS has almost 280 employees, including a 25-seat contact center and six work-at-home agents that handle over 450,000 calls annually. On this tour, you’ll see how technology is used to improve customer service and increase efficiency in a small contact center environment.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide

This call center supports over 2.2 million customer interactions a year, and serves a number of Starwood interests, including the Starwood Preferred Guest program, general reservations, Starwood Preferred Business, Global Distribution, Global Content, as well as the CCC’s training, quality and communications leadership. The Austin Customer Contact Center serves a special niche role among the seven global reservations centers, as it houses a family of specialty departments ranging from a dedicated Luxury Collection & St. Regis brand reservations desk to Global Web Services.

Farmers Insurance

Founded in 1928, Farmers is one of the largest and most respected insurance brands in the United States. The Austin facility opened in April, 2007 and is one of three Farmers ServicePoint(R) operations in the U.S., which represent a complete re-engineering of the service support structure for their agency force and customers. Also located in this facility is the Commercial Business Center, which provides similar services for business insurance, and the Agency Support Center, which provides system application, network and other technical support to Farmers’ agency force across the country. There are about 900 employees in Austin, of which approximately 400 are phone reps who receive 2.1 million calls annually.

The Contact Center Management Conference & Expo is presented by the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI), one of the call center industry’s most respected organizations. To register to attend this event, or to find out more about the conference, media registration, and exhibition opportunities, please visit http://www.icmi.com/CCM2009.

Source: www.voip-news.com

Alpine Access has launched Alpine Access Consulting, a service to help companies set up home-based call centers. The new organization offers insight, advice and support for establishing and managing an at-home call center program.

“The extraordinary benefits offered by the home-based customer service model are impossible to ignore and the increase in demand is proof of that,” said Christopher Carrington, Alpine Access CEO. “Leveraging our expertise to help companies establish their own, internal home-based customer service department is a natural extension to our business. It’s something clients have been requesting for a long time, and we couldn’t ask for a better leader than industry veteran Jim Ball.”

According to Alpine:

The Alpine Access Consulting methodology begins with a cost-benefit analysis and continues through solution development, implementation, operations, performance monitoring and periodic reviews. Whether a company needs help with recruiting, training, workforce management, technology infrastructure, security or any other aspect of operating a home-based agent program, Alpine Access Consulting will develop solutions that are tailor-made for that company.

“From the very start, Alpine Access has been about innovation,” said Jim Ball. “Pioneering new services is how this company was started, so it only makes sense that we are breaking ground with Alpine Access Consulting. I’m looking forward to eliminating the learning curve for other companies and using our experience to help them establish their own programs.”

Interested in starting an at-home call center? Be sure to read up on using VoIP to do it, since that is a huge cost saver.

Source: www.voip-news.com

Call centers are important to businesses of all sizes. They instill a sense of confidence in customers, since someone from the company is available to answer questions at reasonable times. But the cost of creating a call center used to be prohibitive to smaller companies.

That’s not the case anymore.

IP Telephony, and specifically VoIP, has allowed companies to create and implement call centers like large companies have without the high costs of running it. Not only can the equipment be much less than that of traditional call centers, but workers can even work from remote locations — lessening the expenses for physical space needed.

In fact, even AT&T offers VoIP call center technology now …

Source: www.voip-news.com

The Russian telecom, VimpelCom, is expanding its NICE Systems Ltd.  environment by adding new VoIP call centers.

“Our experience with NICE’s solutions in Russia made them the clear favorite for further enhancing our capabilities in our contact centers,” said Leonid Kramarenko, Customer Service Director of VimpelCom. “With the increased familiarity of the Russian and CIS consumer with mobile phone services, even well-known brand-names such as our Bee-Line require top customer care to reduce attrition and find new ways to extract insights that can help us expand market share and reduce costs. NICE provides the ideal solution.”

According to NICE:

VimpelCom is a multi-billion dollar company that provides telecommunications services, fixed-line, wireless, and Internet and integrated telecommunications services under the Beeline brand name. It also provides value-added services, including infotainment, mobile Internet, voice mail, short messaging service, multimedia messaging service, caller number identification, call waiting, and data transmission, among others.

“VimpelCom’s decision to enhance its NICE environment underlines NICE’s ongoing commitment to providing the most advanced solutions to telecommunication companies worldwide,” said Tamir Ginat, President, NICE Systems EMEA. “With a unique capability of uncovering customer wants and needs, as well as the level of service agents are providing, NICE’s solutions are enabling telecoms all over the world to increase their odds of success in a fiercely competitive market, by helping to decrease churn and increase average revenue per user.”

Source: www.voip-news.com

It’s no secret that many workers are looking for out of the box solutions to help them manage work, family and home. That’s why working at home is gaining such popularity. VoIP News of the UK talks about this phenomenon and call centers that use VoIP.

Several service providers are starting to make adaptations to be more VoIP friendly — including a company known for WiMAX adding two VoIP ports to its router. Read about it on VoIP Watch.

VoIP and Gadgets Blog discusses the new mobile VoIP whitepaper from Global IP Solutions.

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.
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