v8rider.net

Call Centers have become extremely commonplace internationally and many businesses outsource their operations to different countries in an effort to control costs.  One difficult problem with this approach is Contact Centre Quality. It is clearly no use outsourcing to save money if in the process you subject your customers to such low quality service that they defect to your competitors instead.

Lousy service in call centers is typcially a management or agent training problem but there are also some interesting technologies available now, such as predictive dialers, that improve the operational capacity of a call centre and thus free up financial resources to allow for top quality agent training.

Dialers use a mixture of soft and hardware technologies to forecast spare agent availability so that the agents themselves are used at maximum capacity. After all, a contact centre agent occupying desk space but not actually talking to a customer is simply increasing overheads whilst not making any revenue.

As is expected with any complex operation with many parallel independent components, economies of scale are there to be exploited, especially if the utilisation rate of each individual - call agents - are not inter dependent. Dynamic, real time analysis of agent call behaviors, agent availability together with work flows can more often than not highlight extra capacity in existing systems. In the Contact Center environment, predictive dialers can deliver massive cost savings without acutally costing a fortune to implement.

Outbound dialers not only schedule calls and allocate them to available agents, they also do this in a way that successfully balances the highest possible utilisation of agents with the lowest levels of silent calls in order to work within individual country’s legislations.

Clever stuff!