Call Center Outsourcing for Today's Businesses

Many successful businesses today have found a way to improve customer service and reduce overall costs by having call center operations run through an outsourced provider.

Call center outsourcing helps businesses to better serve their customers with skilled agents that guarantee high service quality levels. Also, call center outsourcing can be beneficial for businesses looking to succeed in Business 2.0.

A VendorSeek.com article, “Call Center Outsourcing Trends: How Outsourcing Call Center Functions Drive Business 2.0,” highlights the move to Business 2.0 and the role call center outsourcing will play.

According to the article, outsourcing call center activities can help a company to “hold an edge in the market.” For example, the incorporation of social media networking has helped many companies today to improve their operations.

Also, with more and more consumers having wireless services, call centers can utilize the ability to connect with customers whenever needed to lower abandonment as well as increase call satisfaction.

In addition to addressing the new market, call center outsourcing via a hybrid approach allows even companies unwilling to push all of their customer contact outside to select calls to be handled in-house.

Source: tmcnet.com

Knowlagent's Calculator Controls Labor Costs In Call Center

Knowlagent offers calculator that will help to find some quick hits if you’re looking to maximize efficiencies in your call center in the new year.

Using standard industry data or own custom entries, the tool will enable to uncover some of the hidden labor costs driven by common call center staffing methods.

The calculator will discover costs associated with:

-Manual agent management
-Off-phone time for training and coaching
-Avoidable attrition
-Inefficient screening processes.

You can download the calculator here.

Frontier Airlines closes Las Cruces call center

For the first time in nearly nine years, Las Crucen Etta Hough won't go to work tomorrow at the Frontier Airlines call center on Hickory Loop. That's because with today's final shift -- set to end at midnight -- the facility will close its doors.

Hough said she is sad to see this day come.

"Very much so," she said. "We have a very tight-knit group. Everybody has been wonderful to work with."

There are still about 100 workers left at the facility, which at one time employed as many as 200. The airline opened the customer support center in the summer of 2000 and Ruben Servando Valdez has been the facilities manager ever since the first day.

He said that even after Frontier's parent company, Indianapolis-based Republic Airways Holdings Inc., announced earlier this year that the Las Cruces facility would close, the employees kept their heads up.

"People have continued to work hard, we have a remarkable group of people," Servando Valdez said. "I'm blessed to have worked with these people."

The genesis of the closing can be traced to April 2008, when Frontier filed for bankruptcy. This past summer, Republic Airways Holdings won a bankruptcy court auction for Frontier, with a plan to buy the carrier after a bid by Southwest Airlines was rejected. The deal was finalized in October and Republic announced it would consolidate functions between the airlines, including the call centers.

Las Cruces employees were given the opportunity to stay with the companyAdvertisementand move. Servando Valdez said 11 local workers have accepted and will relocate to Denver, where Frontier is based. As for himself, the only manager the Las Cruces call center has ever known said he plans to stay in the area.

"I'm going to be seeking employment here, in the El Paso-Las Cruces area," said Servando Valdez, an El Paso resident.

Hough said that representatives of the New Mexico Workforce Connection's Las Cruces office visited the call center to help workers who would soon be laid off. Usually, the state will put together a rapid response team to help the workers who will lose their jobs. The team offers information on training, unemployment benefits and other services.

"They were excellent," she said.

Source: lcsun-news.com

The Tricky Business of Call Center Metrics

Not long ago, I wrote about a DataInfoCom webcast with Dick Hunter, the former VP of global consumer support services at Dell. I was fascinated with Hunter's forthrightness in discussing how Dell made the transition from focusing on call length in its call centers to how often problems were actually resolved. While measuring customer satisfaction rather than transaction time is seemingly a no-brainer, not many companies do it.

That's not such a surprise, though, says Cheryl Coppens, a director at Customer Operations Performance Center (COPC), a group dedicated to contact center benchmarking, and one of the sources quoted in a destinationCRM story. If companies are still struggling with satisfying customers' basic needs, it's a mistake for them to try to emulate such customer-service champs as Zappos.com.

A well-known anecdote about Zappos, related in this Inc. story as well as others about the online shoe retailer, involves a woman seeking help in returning some shoes she'd ordered for her husband, who died in a car crash. The call center agent ordered flowers for the woman. But offering such touches will backfire if agents aren't able to solve common problems. Said Coppens:

To throw "wow’" campaigns on top and expect bottom-box people to move up because you’re nicer is not going to do it.

Source: itbusinessedge.com

State funding helps 911 call centers

The Virginia Department of Health, Office of Emergency Medical Services recently awarded the Eastern Shore 911 Communications Center a Rescue Squad Assistance Fund grant for the purchase of two channel radios and one VHF radio and antenna system totaling $51,317. These new radio systems will allow call center dispatchers to communicate in an efficient and timely manner.


The Eastern Shore Communications Center serves the counties of Accomack and Northampton to field and dispatch all 911 calls to the proper EMS responder. It also serves as an emergency operations center for any EMS crisis that occurs in the two counties and the town of Chincoteague.

"It is important for volunteer and nonprofit EMS agencies to apply for grant funding in order to reduce their operating costs and maintain a high level of functionality with state-of-the-art equipment," says Gary Brown, director of the Office of Emergency Medical Services.

RSAF grant funding comes from Virginia's "Four-for-Life" program, which is administered by OEMS. Through this program, $4.25 is deducted from every motor vehicle registration to provide funding for EMS programs in Virginia, which include the RSAF grant program and other funding that is returned to localities for EMS training and equipment.

Additional information is available at www.vdh.virginia.gov/OEMS/Grants/.

The Emergency Medical Services grants program is for Virginia non-profit EMS agencies and organizations.