Contact Center Solutions - An Overview

The traditional way of the call center agents answering calls is gradually becoming an obsolete way of providing solutions. In today's Internet enabled world, the consumer driven market is no more satisfied by calling call centers. The consumer would prefer to reach out for contact center solutions by email, IM, text, and more. It is no longer possible to keep your the customers loyal simply by taking calls, and it has become necessary to be proactive in your approach for building a better customer relationship, and also ideally provide satisfactory solutions to customer problems for breaking a deal.

In effect you need a call center and you would need to reach out to the consumer market by using the communication channel that your customer wants. It is important that you do not keep any of your customers waiting while providing contact center solutions and this would mean that you should be able to balance your inbound and outbound communications. For a successful contact center, due considerations have to be given towards reducing your costs and increasing your agent efficiency, while taking into account the value for each and every customer you have.

Home based virtual contact centers have grown in the last two to three years. This growth has been especially leveraged by the large support that the home agent's business model has received from the industries. In implementing this business model, there have been several changes made, and there are several business drivers which are pushing this business model towards success.

Improving customer satisfaction while keeping costs down:

To remain competitive, several organizations, from outsourcing to big corporations, have drastically cut down on costs in providing contact center solutions by moving their call centers abroad to countries like India and the Philippines. This has become very cost effective since home agents are much cheaper to retain with an estimated 20% to 25% cut in costs.

The usage of available technology:

In the past there was a significant drawback in communication for the home agents. Presently with the availability of Broadband, the connectivity problem has been solved to a great extent. As for multi-site contact centers, costs involving efficiency-draining levels of infrastructure complexity has been brought down by the use of server consolidations, which has helped companies to eliminate under utilization of hardware there-by reducing related expenses. The use of resource pooling has increased the efficiency of existing equipment, and the added business intelligence in providing contact center solutions have further increased efficiency, there-by improving customer loyalty.

Means of cost reduction:

The efficiency of contact centers are being further enhanced by "just in time" work allocation, with the agent having less idle time which has increased agent occupancy. This has further reduced staffing costs, with the supervisor having more time to mentor and train agents.

Adaptation of the right business logic reduces customer wait times, and ensures that calls are routed to the agents having the correct skills, connecting the top level customers with highly skilled sales associates. Lower wait time provides a guaranteed customer satisfaction, and reduces call abandoning by a great extent.


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The leaders of the great call centers in each industry meet once a year at the call centre awards ceremony of SQM Group. They award the most prestigious North American contact centre awards.