Outbound Call Center Featured Article

Boutique Phoning Provides Clear Calling for the Blind

By Carolyn J Dawson
TMCnet Contributor

Boutique Phoning, a rural outsourcing call center, creates unique one-on-one discussion with customers, by offering the blind and partially sighted solid results. Boutique Phoning specializes in business to business calls, and other tasks, including scheduling appointments, lead generation, research or survey studies, updating client lists, promote events or functions, and follow up on mailing campaigns and trade shows. It is now an essential part of rural outsourcing.

In a press release, a Professor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, Mary Lacity, said, “A handful of fast-growing information technology companies in remote areas of the United States that are positioning themselves as alternatives to offshore outsourcing. And the rates of the rural outsourcers are better than their domestic counterparts in big cities because the towns and small cities where they operate have lower living costs. Their value proposition is, 'we cost less than the East and West Coast, and we're easier to deal with than India.’ No numbers exist for the size of the rural outsourcing market in the United States and it is estimated it's less than $100 million a year. She notes that interest has grown in the past two years as federal policymakers seek ways to create jobs and as government outsourcing contracts increasingly require work be done in the United States.”

Unlike the usual call center call rooms where one can hear a babble of voices and lots of other disturbances, Boutique Phoning allows both the phoners and callers to hear each other clearly and complete the transaction in a satisfactory style. Encouraging the blind or the partial sighted works well from both the business and personal side, as far as business point of view is concerned, it has been proved that the blind have better hearing abilities and can pick up words or even hesitancy easily, the strive to make the caller comfortable, and hence have often higher closing rate. They also work from home so there are no additional costs occurred as travelling expenses for the company.

Potential employees are chosen with great care and have to go through a rigorous screening process and once they are hired they spend atleast 5 hours training one-on-one with the client, making them proficient and extremely knowledgeable about the client’s campaigns and policies. Jenny Facer is one such blind personal telephone assistant who works from home, and has a Braille display reader along with her computer, where the excel format of telemarketing list of names and phone numbers gets translated into voice and she reads the same on her Braille display, and then communicates efficiently with the client via telephone or email just like other sighted phoners. There have been times when the client doesn’t even know that their personal telephone assistant is blind or partially sighted.