Research for the report found that respondents who had implemented virtual contact centers were generally very pleased with the gains in efficiency and service levels that they have experienced. Nearly three quarters cited ability to smooth out call spikes by balancing the load between contact centers as their top benefit, followed closely by reduced wait times, wider ranges of skills available to callers, and overall cost savings between sites.

Managing Those Spikes

Coping with call spikes is one issue which is growing year upon year. With virtual contact center technology, like that offered by CosmoCom, call workload is not limited to a single site, but instead can be allocated across all agent locations, including home workers, as call volume increases. Spreading the load helps eliminate many of the issues normally associated with call spikes.

Flexibility to allocate agents when and where needed means better agent utilization, so virtual call centers are less likely to have agents sitting idle while others are under great pressure. This same flexibility also expands the pool of agent talent available to callers, including specific technical and language skills. The resulting reduction in wait time and increased access to skilled agents translates to increased caller satisfaction.

A majority of virtual contact center respondents also strongly agree that there have been significant savings on call costs when the calls are split between remote physical sites.

Fearing Complexity

Of the survey respondents with multiple-site contact centers that had not yet virtualized their operations, 61% agreed that their main concern was the management of teams across multiple locations.

"Managing virtual teams across any number of virtual contact center locations is simplified when you have a unified platform like CosmoCall Universe (CCU)," explained Steve Kaish, CosmoCom VP of Product Management. "With all of the call center features unified together seamlessly in one high-availability, highly scalable platform, it makes it much easier to manage virtual teams."

According to the report's author, Steve Morrell, "The best virtual contact center technologies allow multiple operations or even home workers to be linked together so as to be viewed and managed as a single mega-site." (continued...)

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