Serve Global - Call Local: One-World Virtual Call Centers
Businesses both big and small are required in today's economy to serve customers globally. Customer expectations are high and companies have to constantly compete by delivering excellent sales, service and support, often around the clock. But providing
quality global customer service across time zones is costly and difficult to manage and implement.
Many businesses are forced to balkanize their customer service operations with multiple isolated call centers each replete with a full suite of contact center technology investments. Such investments have to be tailored to the expected call volume peaks at each site leading to waste and overspending. Moreover, enterprises are unable to share agents across call centers when call volumes overwhelm capacity in one call center while agents sit idle in another. They can't deploy follow-the-sun operations that allow staffing of contact center agents in the time zone where it is convenient. Worse, they can't provide consistent service to their customers regardless of time and place.
Fortunately software solutions are now available that enable the inexpensive deployment of a single virtual contact center across the globe. Ideally, a solution should decouple telephony and media manipulation functions from the contact center application. This allows the application to be located centrally and shared globally while the telephony and media manipulation functions are dispersed geographically close to the callers.
The most effective solutions also exploit off-the-shelf media gateways and media servers to implement the set of telephony and media manipulation functions needed for full-featured contact centers. Enterprises locate these inexpensive gateways and servers in the geography where the calls originate and connect them to their local telecom carrier on one side and their global IP network on the other. Calls originating on a local carrier land on the nearest gateway-server complex for call treatment, call queuing, call routing and automatic call distribution to any agent connected to the global IP network under the control of the single virtual contact center application. Call monitoring, recording and transfer using the same gateway-server complex is also highly desirable.
One company that aims to deliver on the promise of a true one-world virtual contact center is Transera. The company offers a patented virtual call center solution that uses distributed off-the-shelf gateways and servers to dramatically reduce the cost of capital, while enabling the sharing of agents across globally distributed call center locations.