Outbound Call Center Featured Article

TMCnet Outbound Call Center Week in Review

By David Sims
TMCnet Contributing Editor

The outbound call center industry is huge right now, and there was a lot of news this past week. Here are some of the top headlines.

TMC’s (News - Alert) Linda Dobel reported that contact centers are proving to be a bright spot in the otherwise dismal economy in Ireland. It appears, as well, that the contact center star will continue to shine even brighter for that country in the coming years.  

News came this past week, Dobel wrote, from Contact Centre Clinic that Contact Centre Management Association of Ireland (CCMA) is reporting that there has been significant growth in Ireland’s contact center sector over the course of the last year, not only in the number of people employed but in the revenue Irish contact centers brought in as well.

The report said that there are now more than 29,000 people employed by more than 100 contact centers throughout the country. Fifty-two percent of the contact centers represented in the research, which was conducted in the second quarter of this year, also reported that their revenues rose in 2010 and between now and the next three years, nearly three quarters of the respondents to the survey think their contact center revenues will continue to increase.

Also this past week Anuradha Shukla wrote that Global Connect (News - Alert) is putting powerful dialing intelligence into the hands of its customers with the launch of the first fully integrated score-based dialing solution from the cloud.

The company has partnered with Global LiquidEdge Solutions, a provider of collection scores and workflow optimization solutions.

Global Connect provides cloud-based hosted dialing and communication services. The new solution leverages its hosted dialing solution and best time-to-call reporting with Global LiquidEdge's collection scores and call sloping strategies to deliver improved liquidation and lower overall call expense.

The score-based dialing solution from the cloud can seamlessly analyze clients' dialer lists, scores them for collectability, and then dials with precision and appropriate frequency.

TMC also had the news that GC1 Peak Dialer was launched by Global Connect. Collections clients can quickly, easily and cost effectively reach contacts with this hosted cloud-based dialer platform. Clients are able to increase agent productivity with the new advances in Global Connect's hosted dialer functionality.

At the same time, clients are able to keep the operating costs low. An announcement in this regard has been made by the top provider of cloud-based hosted dialing and communication services.

Darrin Bird, chief operating officer of Global Connect, said, “In today's economic climate, clients are actively looking for tools and systems that help them accomplish more with less. Since there are no upfront fees, hardware or software expenses, the GC1 Peak Dialer's hosted cloud-based system offers a solution that is as economical as it is effective.”

Cloud-based technology is used by GC1 Peak Dialer. The dialer can be directly logged into by agents for campaigns like Direct Connect Predictive Dialer campaigns. Web portal log-in can be utilized by agents for RPC Predictive Campaigns. A secure and unique login for each agent is provided by the system into the GC1 Peak Dialer.

And finally, TMC reported that Anthelio, a provider of healthcare information technology services and business process solutions for hospitals and other healthcare providers, launched IT-ology, a help desk staffed by physicians and other clinicians.  

Leveraging the 24/7 IT-ology, physicians will have an expert resource who understands the clinical implications of the doctor’s technical concern.

Moreover, physicians and clinicians can navigate sophisticated technical issues that arise during EHR implementations, while guaranteeing minimal hold times to allow physicians to spend more time with patients.

“As hospitals advance to more sophisticated levels of EHR usage, we are seeing a dramatic  shift in the percentage of help desk calls that are clinical in nature, from 7 percent historically to more than 30 percent today,” said Wendy Whittington, chief medical officer of Anthelio.