Outbound Call Center Featured Article

TMCnet's Outbound Call Center Week in Review

By Amanda Ciccatelli
TMCnet Web Editor

There is an array of Outbound Call Center news this week with breaking news from NTI, the Federal Communications Commission and the Mattersight Corporation.

NTI is a nonprofit organization that provides job opportunities for Americans with disabilities that require home-based work. The grant will be for Americans with disabilities that live anywhere in the U.S. in work-at-home jobs.

Disabled Americans who would like to work from home may qualify for an online job in customer service, technical support, medical transcription, quality control, or other types of work. NTI has worked for over 15 years with employers, Social Security Disability Insurance, and with vocational rehabilitation services that work with disabled individuals.

Elaine Katz, Kessler Foundation's vice president of Grant Programs and Special Initiatives said in a statement, “NTI offers a creative approach that addresses the objectives of our grants enabling people with disabilities to overcome obstacles to employment while meeting the workforce needs of American business. NTI's proposal outlined a cost-effective strategy that will result in more job opportunities per budget dollar, with a nationwide scope.”

In other news, companies have had success with automated outbound calling and many others would appear to be doing little but annoying their customers and prospective customers. Automated outbound calling can remind customers of appointments, distribute important information and enable consumers to accomplish simple transactions.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC (News - Alert) ) is expected to approve tougher rules giving consumers additional protection against unwanted automated outbound calls to home phone lines, USA Today reported. The agency, which says complaints about “robo-calls” are soaring, plans to accomplish this crackdown by closing some gaping loopholes in existing outbound marketing laws.

“We have gotten thousands of complaints,” said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski (News - Alert). “Consumers were still getting robo-calls they don't want and shouldn't get.”

Lastly, Mattersight Corporation recently announced the expansion of its Behavioral Analytics service to include predictive routing. Mattersight's Predictive Routing automatically routes customer calls based on advanced algorithms that predict the best available contact center agent to handle each specific caller. Mattersight's Predictive Routing was designed to integrate easily with widely used telephony and routing systems to route callers based on this predictive pairing analysis, said the company in a press release.

Mattersight's Predictive Routing leverages behavioral analytics data to address a number of traditional gaps in many companies' current routing strategies. It can take into consideration agent performance variations, the fact that better performing agents often have lower utilization rates and can help companies better associate a customer's data to that customer's contacts with the call center.