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TMCnet Outbound Call Center Week in Review

Welcome to the weekend, and another edition of the Outbound Call Center Week in Review, where we sum up the week's news in the newest in outbound technology.

TMCnet's Jamie Epstein wrote this week that analytics and decision management company FICO has teamed up with Adeptra to offer the FICO's payment card fraud detection product, FICO Falcon Fraud Manager 6, enhanced with customer contact functionalities provided by Adeptra. The integrated offering is expected to allow users to more easily create customized rules associated with their fraud detection strategies: such as when an auto dialer or a text messaging function should be used in an outbound call center strategy to notify customers of the card fraud. The system will then automatically work according to those preset rules.

Epstein also profiled a case study this week regarding outbound telephone calls for the purpose of debt collection to cell phones. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act enforces the same rules for debt collection calls to landlines for collection calls made by auto dialers to cell phones. If the consumer does not opt-in to collection calls to be made to their cell phones, then in fact these calls are in violation of the Do Not Call Registry. One individual successfully sued an debt collection firm for a series of outbound telephone calls to his cellular phone: calls trying to collect a debt from another person.

Yours truly wrote this week that debt resolution and settlement solutions provider Debt Resolve, Inc. and collections solutions provider CDS Software (News - Alert) have announced they have entered into a strategic partnership in which CDS will market Debt Resolve's DR Settle to its clients. Simi Valley, California-based CDS Software provides a collections product called CollectOne, and Tarrytown, New York-based Debt Resolve (News - Alert) offers DR Settle, an online bidding system for the resolution and settlement of consumer debt, as well as a collections and skip tracing solution tailored to each stage of the collection and recovery processes.

Cloud-based call center software company Five9 (News - Alert) announced this week that it was named by Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC (News - Alert)) as a recipient of a Customer Interaction Solutions magazine 2011 CRM Excellence Award for its Five9 Virtual Call Center. The company's Virtual Call Center suite offers blended, inbound or outbound call centers a variety of cloud-based call center features, all in one integrated and customizable package.

TMCnet's Susan Campbell wrote this week about the challenges of successfully running a blended call center. When blending is coupled with routing in the call center, managers are able to gain control over the highest value calls. Without a robust hosted predictive dialer in place, many of these call centers blending their calls tend to fail to also add skills-based routing at the same time. Skills-Based routing for the enterprise can provide significant value, but it must be controlled so that the peaks and valleys of inbound call traffic can be streamlined. The cost of blended stations and the complexity of managing them tend to make them rare or underutilized.

Finally, TMCnet special guest writer Nathan Stearns of IEX (News - Alert) Corp. wrote that many outbound call center managers have always had a powerful workforce management tool that inbound managers have never had: control over call volume. Think of that control as a giant knob on a radio, wrote Stearns. When a person wanted to adjust the volume due to staffing issues, that person merely needed to “reach for the knob.” In fact, in some outbound operations, the whole of outbound contact center workforce management (WFM) could be summed up as follows: Turn the knob up or turn the knob down.

That's all for this week in the world of outbound call centers. Have a great weekend!

Tracey Schelmetic is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Tracey's articles, please visit her columnist page.