Virtual Call Centres – Part 1

The call centre landscape has so far been driven by the technology. To drive bigger efficiencies – agents have needed to be concentrated into agent groups – and hence into large buildings – often into giant warehouses. These often gave the feel that workers were just a cog in a giant machine.

The problems started to arise when you could not fit enough agents into a big building. New buildings had to be built and this is when the real problems started.

Because of the limitations on the cost of bandwidth and also on the technology used in the ACD systems, calls would be shared between call centres. This was typically for load balancing across expensive private line circuits.

A typical example is shown in Figure 1.

Agents would be split into agent groups in each of the different locations. To distribute the calls between the different locations, and to keep costs down – calls were answered locally and the excess calls were sent to the other locations to help balance out the peaks and troughs.

Various technologies were deployed to help reduce the problems of doing this – in a private environment through post call routing, or in the public environment through pre-call routing. But there were always trade offs. “Seamless call flow was always the vision. But the difficulty was that the onus was nearly always on the vendor and it was very difficult to achieve.” said Dudley LeRus, Vice President of global marketing for Amcat. “Now at the end of 2005 it seems to becoming a reality.

With the adoption of IP on premise routing technology, along with plentiful amounts of available bandwidth in the internet and private networks, virtual call centres now look to take the call centre world by storm.

“The whole geographical basis of call centres is now changing – it doesn't really matter where you are located now. As long as you have an IP connection you could be located almost anywhere in the world and be able to take calls” comments Lode Vande Sande, a call centre consultant based in Belgium.

Rather than setting up your call centre at the head office, which can be very expensive, you can now more easily employ clusters of agents as remote locations where you can get the skills that you require. This could be in your own location or it could be offshore, or even near shore. It makes outsourcing a lot easier.

One of the biggest advantages of Virtual Call Centres is the ease of management. You can put all of your call centres into a single agent group, or you can put all of agents into different skill groups – irrespective of their location. It is also much easier to be able to track management information.

Home working

You would have thought that virtual call centres would lead to a large increase of home agents. The need to answer call peaks, as well as being able to deal with unsocial hours should make home working very attractive. But it seems that out-of-sight really does mean out-of-mind when it comes to home working.

The home agent concept has been slow to take off. “The technology is there and people ask about it,” comments Dudley Lerus. “But call centres like to have team supervision, team management and team competitions. Companies like to be working directly with their agents, talking to them and listening to what they are doing. This is possible in a remote working environment, but you don’t have that close physical contact. - This is particularly true in a sales environment and lots and even in an inbound call centre you are usually marketing some type of product.”

Next month, in Part 2, we will look at the technology involved in setting up Virtual Call Centres.