Call Centers – No longer a barrier to entry
As a business owner, you’re responsible to many people. You have a responsibility to your customers to deliver the services for which you are paid to deliver. You have a responsibility to your staff to have a productive work environment. You have a responsibility to your investors to be fiscally responsible, and make a profit. Most importantly, you have a responsibility to yourself to meet your responsibilities to all the others without bearing a personal cost.
It can be scary enough for a business owner to consider using open source to provide services/major functions of their business. Without a support contract, support team, or on staff guru, how can one take such risks? What if you’re business is telephone calls? Would you trust your entire operation to open source? Well, it seems that many do, but they chances are they don’t have the same priorities as those who we just described.
In the world prior to commoditising of complex communication platforms, a call center business had many barriers to entry. Not just anyone could do it. Today, what was once a complex business my be someone’s hobby. A person with a good amount of savvy and experience with open source can build a call center system which rivals some of the majors, just for fun, and without a business model to back it. No worries, they did it on a 4 year old PC in they had laying around in their closet, so it won’t break any banks.
Now that the technology is just sitting there, idle, available to anyone who wants to invest a bit of time in to it, people who have a bright idea can put it in to action without that ancient barrier to entry.
As anyone with telecommunication experience will tell you, the technology is just a very small piece to the call center business. You can’t do anything without a connectivity partner. When you’re working inbound, you’re married to one carrier, for the most part. If you’re lucky enough to have an outbound call center, you have a lot more flexibility then others, since you can move from carrier to carrier as quickly as you can reconfigure your trunks and dialplans. Not surprisingly, many of the great new feature sites we’re seeing pop up are outbound.
VoIP carriers offer an amazing amount of flexibility without serious commitment. With a single data T1, a staff of well over 40 agents, who are obviously very dutiful about cross-referencing do-no-call lists, can run your outbound call campaigns all day long for pennies. Replace those agents with text to speech or pre-recorded prompts, and you not only don’t have a staffing cost, but your business can be 24 hours.
Does this mean that we’re more likely to be interrupted during dinner tonight to take a phone survey, or receive an automated call reminding us of our dental appointment tomorrow morning, or to get a reminder call that tonight’s Heroes is a new episode? Probably.
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