One example of the effective use of VOIP-based virtual call centers comes from Alta Colleges, which is headquartered in Denver and is the parent of Westwood College, which in turn has eighteen campuses in five states and a significant online presence. Alta uses CosmoCall Universe, an enterprise VoIP-based IP-based contact center platform, to seamlessly unify student/administration relationships. No matter how students contact the administration (telephone call, email, or any other medium), and no matter which of the three contact centers they reach, the students will get intelligent responses as if they have contacted a single, unified contact center.
We asked Segar Annamalai, chief information officer at Westwood College, about how the system is working.
What can you do with VOIP-based CRM that you couldn't do before?
Annamalai: With CosmoCom's unified approach to multi-channel communication, we will be able to provide an even higher level of service, while gaining efficiency by making one virtual contact center out of our three locations that now function as completely separate entities.
Why do you have three contact center locations in the first place?
Annamalai: We have three contact centers because of the contact center rep availability/labor market, each center specializes in a segment of the customer and the need to have redundancy between contact centers.
Where are they located?
Annamalai: Two are located in Denver and the other in Colorado Springs.
What were you using before you tried CosmoCall Universe?
Annamalai: Traditional PBX (NEC).
What are the most common questions or issues that students and administrators use CosmoCall Universe for?
Annamalai: Mainly for contacting prospective students and student service support.
Surely some technical questions can only be answered by one or two people.
Annamalai: We have cross-trained our staff to be able to handle some of the more challenging questions. Hence they are placed in a pool where the calls get routed and anyone in the pool is able to answer the questions.
How do you make sure the questions get to the right agent? How does the system allow you to reroute questions to someone else if they're not available?
Annamalai: We use the agent skills maintained in the CosmoCom table to route the calls to the right agents.
Momentum is building in favour of the latest IP-based systems for call centers that offer compelling advantages over traditional circuit based on ACD switches. By delivering the voice traffic over the IP network (Voice-Over-Internet Protocol ), now the latest systems are more simplify for networking of multiple, geographically dispersed centers; Handle phone calls , e-mails, and web contacts. So in this way we can say that using VoIP saves our time as well as money which helps in making economy stronger .
Posted by: Kamal Kumar | June 13, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink to Comment