Virtualization a Winner for Multisite Contact Centers According to CosmoCom Sponsored Study
72% of Executives Report Significant Improvements in Call Handling Statistics
Melville, NY (PRWEB) March 31, 2010
The latest research by contact center industry analysts at ContactBabel has confirmed that joining multisite contact center operations together into a single 'virtual' contact center has brought significant benefits to both businesses and their customers. This is according to the more than 200 contact center operational leaders surveyed for "The US Contact Center Decision-Makers' Guide" -- a major annual study produced by ContactBabel and sponsored by CosmoCom.
Research for the report has found that respondents who had implemented virtual contact centers (http://www. cosmocom. com/Solutions/enterprises. htm) were generally very pleased with the gains in efficiency and service levels that they have experienced. Nearly three quarters cited ability to smooth out call spikes by balancing the load between contact centers as their top benefit, followed closely by reduced wait times, wider ranges of skills available to callers, and overall cost savings between sites.
Coping with call spikes is one issue which is growing year upon year. With virtual contact center technology, like CosmoCom’s, call workload is not limited to a single site, but instead can be allocated across all agent locations (including home workers) as volume or business rules dictate, heading off many of the issues normally associated with call spikes.
Flexibility to allocate agents when and where needed means better agent utilization, so virtual call centers are less likely to have agents sitting idle while others are under great pressure. This same flexibility also expands the pool of agent talent available to callers, including specific technical and language skills. The resulting reduction in wait time and increased access to skilled agents translates to increased caller satisfaction. A majority of virtual contact center respondents also strongly agree that there have been significant savings on call costs between physical sites.
Of the survey respondents with multiple-site contact centers that had not yet virtualized their operations, 61% agreed that their main concern was the management of teams across multiple locations. "Managing virtual teams across any number of virtual contact center locations is simplified when you have a unified platform like CosmoCall Universe (CCU)," explains Steve Kaish, CosmoCom VP of Product Management, "With all of the call center features unified together seamlessly in one high-availability, highly scalable platform, it makes it much easier to manage virtual teams."
The report's author, Steve Morrell, comments, "The best virtual contact center technologies allow multiple operations or even homeworkers to be linked together so as to be viewed and managed as a single mega-site. This allows significant economies of scale and improvements in performance to take place, without the attendant problems around environment, morale and attrition that plague many very large operations. Our research shows that those businesses which have taken the virtualization route have usually found very significant cost and performance benefits. "
"The findings in the report reinforce that our core value propositions around multi-tenant, multi-site virtual contact centers (http://www. cosmocom. com/productInfo/Product. htm) are right on target," said CosmoCom CEO, Ari Sonesh, "It is also worth noting that survey participants reporting the highest use of multi contact center deployments were in the healthcare and insurance industries, which explains why we’ve seen such good uptake in these verticals."
A complimentary report extract on "New Ways of Working" and "Virtual Contact Centers" can be downloaded at http://www. cosmocom. com/to/ContactBabel-US910-multi (http://www. cosmocom. com/to/ContactBabel-US910-multi).
About ContactBabel and "The US Contact Center Decision-Maker's Guide - 2009-2010"
The "US Contact Center Decision-Makers' Guide (2009/2010 - 3rd edition)" is a major annual report studying the performance, operations, technology and HR aspects of US contact center operations. Taking a random sample of the industry, a detailed structured questionnaire was asked to 212 contact center managers and directors in mid-2009. The result is the 3rd edition of the largest and most comprehensive study of all elements of the US contact center industry.
About CosmoCom
CosmoCom™, the global leader in Contact Center Consolidation (http://www. cosmocom. com/to/callcenterconsolidation1)2.0, excels in providing IP contact center (http://www. cosmocom. com/productInfo/Product. htm) platforms for enterprises with the largest and most complex requirements, consolidating multiple locations, onshore, offshore, and home-shore agents, formal and informal agents, captive and outsourced operations, multiple communication channels, and multiple applications. Organizations can obtain the full benefits of Consolidation 2.0 by deploying CosmoCom technology themselves or by working with a service provider that hosts CosmoCom platforms on a dedicated or shared basis. CosmoCom customers include Fortune-class enterprises throughout the world and service providers such as BT, Deutsche Telekom, Orange Business Services, Telefonica, NTT, Tata, PLDT, Verizon, and many others. CosmoCom is the most-selected provider of hosted contact center platforms to top-tier telcos worldwide. For more information, please visit http://www. cosmocom. com (http://www. cosmocom. com).
All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners.
Media Contact for CosmoCom:
Kathy Salt
+1 631-940-4297
Ksalt(at)cosmocom(dot)com
Contact Babel Contact details:
Steve Morrell (Principal Analyst)
Smorrell(at)contactbabel(dot)com
+44 1740 629 835 (UK)
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