When doesn't international outsourcing work for call centers? When transfer of the call to a foreign agent becomes obvious to the customer. The only companies that can turn a model of an internationally distributed call center organization into reality are those companies with the resources to provide seamless transfers between locations.
Today, MCI announced a new solution called Global ECR (Enhanced Call Routing) designed to make it easier for companies to accept, forward and route customer calls to different locations throughout the world, without losing the seamless feel of the call. Solutions like these strive to take the traditional call routing methods and turn them on their ear, while remaining economical to the company that implements them (perhaps even more economical than traditional methods). The full release is below.
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MCI, Inc. (NASDAQ: MCIP) today announced the launch of its Global Enhanced Call Routing (ECR) service which allows companies to accept, forward, and route contact center calls from their customers internationally. This network-based solution helps customers decrease end-user wait times, reduce overall management costs and increase customer satisfaction.
Ideal for enterprise and government organizations with contact centers in multiple countries, Global ECR significantly improves customer service levels and protects users from the financial risk of equipment obsolescence, while reducing capital investment costs. Global ECR eliminates a company’s need to manage a costly, premises-based Intelligent Voice Recognition (IVR) solution and changes the economic business model from a capital intensive investment to a pay-as-you-go solution.
“Global ECR gives multinational corporations the flexibility to establish contact centers where it makes the most economic and strategic sense, while maintaining the ability to respond quickly to international calls,” said Nancy Gofus, senior vice president of MCI IP Services. “The global reach and advanced capabilities of MCI’s contact center solution helps businesses improve their customer service by efficiently managing calls between diverse contact center locations.”
Global ECR decreases the number of systems to manage and provides feature enhancements that on-premises solutions may not be able to offer including built in redundancy, flexibility and country-to-country routing. For example, by using Take-Back-and-Transfer, calls can be transferred between agents within the same call center or to a facility in a different country. Global ECR also supports features, such as Menu Routing, Database Routing and Busy/No Answer Rerouting to ensure all calls are received and routed to the most appropriate call center or agent group.
With Global ECR, callers can hear pre-recorded messages, select prompts and enter specific information via touch-tone or speech recognition, to have calls routed to the appropriate agents based on subject matter, time of day, customer request and other criteria. In addition, callers no longer need to sit on hold waiting for an agent to understand the purpose of their call because the caller makes decisions based on menu options presented to them, and the call is routed accordingly.
To sustain international businesses, MCI’s Global ECR is a multilingual solution supporting British English, French, German and Dutch menu prompts and message announcements. Additional languages are supported based on business needs. By creating multilingual solutions callers can hear and respond to menu options in their native language, as well as receive information in local currency denominations. Global ECR also supports invoicing and reporting in multiple languages and currencies based on a business’s preference.
Understanding that global customers utilize numerous access technologies for communications, MCI has designed its Global ECR solution to support major international access types. This gives businesses the ability to support their existing business model while moving to a feature-rich call routing solution.
MCI Global ECR is immediately available to US- and European-based corporations with call center operations in major international markets
About MCI
MCI, Inc. (NASDAQ: MCIP) is a leading global communications provider, delivering innovative, cost-effective, advanced communications connectivity to businesses, governments and consumers. With one of the most expansive global IP backbones and wholly-owned data networks, MCI develops the converged communications products and services that are the foundation for commerce and communications in today's market. For more information, go to www.mci.com.
