Five9, who sell on-demand call center software, recently released a video explaining their offerings. They also offer hosted call center services, with thousands of agents serving over 1,000 clients, according to the video presentation.
Last year TMC’s Kelly McGuire spoke with M.J. Willard, who runs the National Telecommuting Institute, about the benefits of virtual call centers and, specifically, why hosted contact center and call center on demand software provider Five9's Virtual Call Center Suite is such a great product.
“We came across a company in the last 6 months called Five9 and they don't hire people directly, but they produce this hosted app that allows any call center outside -- small ones, large ones -- and they can go virtual in a matter of a week or so,” Willard said. “We actually use them ourselves for our own recruiters. It took us a week to go virtually with our workforce.”
For inbound call centers, the company offers CRM integration, VoIP, agent scripting, reporting, IVR, voice recording and other features. For outbound call centers they offer a whole range of features, including a predictive dialer call recording and agent scripting.
Feature packages also include speech recognition, voice message broadcasting and workforce management.
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Recently Interact posted an informative YouTube video to highlight the fact that their real-time billing and rating platform. It’s provided mobile operators worldwide with the ability to rate voice, data and content in real time.
With Joined Accounts, small businesses can join multiple employees under one business cell phone plan and have only one bill to manage for all employees with a mobile phone.
As TMC’s Anuradha Shukla wrote last year, InvigoratePlus “has been developed for emergent communications operators, and as it succeeds the Invigorate billing and rating engine, it will feature all of its precursor's functionality yet be less overhead intensive.”
By doing so, company officials say, it will allow adopters to enjoy the highest levels of configuration alternatives and scalability available today. InvigoratePlus was intended to help Tier 2/3 operators satisfy their exacting requirements for present and/or future diversification strategies and who expect to have to deal with tremendous growth in the future.
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If you have at-home agent programs you know what some of the advantages are. They can be a cost-effective way to scale a business, for one thing, and pretty low on your overhead expenses. But still, yours may be one of the many companies which struggle with effectively managing a remote workforce and guaranteeing that all call center operations are successful.
Granted, it is harder to manage people who aren’t in the same room with you. One vendor, Knowlagent, understands the problems call center operations have when managing remote workforces, and is looking to make it easier to expand your workforce beyond the brick and mortar enterprise, by keeping remote agents “connected to the core business and their team while outside the center walls,” company officials say.
What are the issues remote call center operations usually run into? Some of them are efficiently handling the time at-home agents spend reading internal communications, completing research, project work, coaching sessions and ongoing training. Knowlagent understands this, and provides both agents and supervisors with the processes and tools they need to effectively manage performance from a distance.
In order to be successful, Knowlagent officials say, contact center management must schedule time for agents both on and off the phone. “There’s no way around it – agents will have to spend time off the phone to handle such shrinkage activities as administrative tasks, review of key updates and policies, one-on-one coaching, ongoing training and more.”
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According to research reported by Time Warner, U.S. Hispanics are “passionate about social media and discovering new ways to share their personal stories with friends and family back home.” With increasing ways to communicate through social media, Spanish language contact centers are becoming more popular in America.
There are over 13.5 million Hispanics currently living in the United States who are on Facebook, according to Time Warner Cable, which has recently launched the new “Mi Vida, A Mi Manera” (My Life, My Way) application on its Mi Cultura page “to celebrate these cultural experiences.”
The idea is to give Mi Cultura fans an online tool to, in the words of Time Warner officials, “honor loved ones, special events and places that have helped them become who they are today.”
Customers can use the “Mi Vida, A Mi Manera” application to create video collages by uploading photos and videos, selecting from different music and design options, and sharing these videos via Facebook.
The application was created entirely in Spanish for Spanish-dominant and bilingual consumers.
Read more here.
