Outbound Call Center Featured Article

TMCnet Outbound Call Center Week in Review

By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor

It's that time again: time for another wrap-up of the week's happenings in outbound call center technologies and services.

When it comes to running an efficient call center, money truly is the bottom line. Software is a necessary tool to enhance operations, yet an effective software solution that improves productivity and is available at a fraction of the cost is worth closer inspection. For the call center, the technology worth investigating is the hosted predictive dialer. According to this recent LiveVox (News - Alert) blog, applications available through cloud services provide this productivity and reduced cost. With the hosted predictive dialer, the elimination of maintenance fees is just another way to add flexibility and financial security for the call center. Ridiculous maintenance fees can be a thing of the past if cloud services can be better understood and utilized.

We like to make it a point of staying on top of the very latest, very hottest news from the world of technology at TMCnet, and while that undertaking can be daunting at times, with all the buzz words, acronyms, and daily developments, sometimes the market makes it quite easy. Let’s say you’ve been living under a rock for a year. Or maybe even a month. You emerge slowly, uncrackle your spine, blink a bit at the dim December sun, and ask the first person you meet what the one thing is you should know about to sufficiently reenter the world of functioning first-world humans. That person says, “The cloud.” Boom. You’re back.

This week, Altitude Software, a provider of contact center solutions including a predictive dialer has released an integrated solution that combines Altitude uCI suite with Microsoft (News - Alert) Dynamics CRM 2011. The Altitude + MS-CRM Connector for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is a pre-packaged solution that immediately leverages the power of an easy-to-use CRM system through a suite of contact center applications, company officials said in a press release. The new solution provides businesses of all sizes with out-of-the-box functionality to reduce solution deployment time and total ownership costs. Users can easily unify their customer contact history with customer insight in the CRM system, as the system is used by both sales and contact center teams.

Back in October, TMCnet recapped its favorite voice broadcast apps for the iPhone (News - Alert), but this week, a new app with a built-in mass notification system has taken the spotlight – and it’s available to both iPhone and Android (News - Alert) consumers. A company offering a voice broadcast service that allows members to record their own custom voice message and blast it to a group of recipients, DialMyCalls has made this same functionality available on iPhone and Android smartphones.

Once a message is recorded using the DialMyCalls app, users can then create a list of phone numbers to call and schedule a time and date to send the call out. Whether it’s two or 200,000 users, each number is instantly dialed and comes with a corresponding downloadable call report that details what happened during the call.

The call center environment – whether outbound or inbound or both – is a dynamic and demanding mix of changing call volumes, varied agent skill and rotating campaigns. To effectively manage all of these elements and deliver on customer expectations when it comes to service, leaders in this space benefit considerably from call center training. The Resource Center for Customer Service Professionals (RCCSP) offers extensive call center training options, including its latest: Designing Effective Questionnaires. A hands-on training course for call center leaders, this session is designed to appeal to those charged with the task of creating an effective survey tool for the purpose of gathering respondent data. Such data may include product feedback, customer service satisfaction or other intelligent information.

That's all for this week in the world of outbound call center news. See you again next week!