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What is a virtual call center? It is a call center where the representatives or employees are dispersed geographically, rather that working from a building operated by a company. They might be located in smaller centers or more commonly now, working from satellite home offices. The savings and benefits that can be realized with these call center solutions can be advantageous to both the company and the employee. The company saves on overhead expenses such as housing and equipment costs and the employee benefits from the flexibility and comfort of working from home. This adds up to lower employee turnover rates and absenteeism, which are the plague of physical call centers. Many other companies choose to link existing offices with the use of virtual technology. Call centers are not what they used to be. VoIP call centers are managed in such a way that customers believe they have reached the actual company when in all reality they have been routed to an outsourced location. A Web call center works in much the same way and the incident of jobs being filled in other countries, than where the customer's calls originate and even the company is located, are becoming more common place. A great example of a call center that went virtual and virtually improved service overnight is the New York State Workers' Compensation Board (WCB). Even though the WCB had digitized all its paper files customer service trailed far behind. No office contained the same equipment-a Centrex system here, Lucent gear there-with customer service staff being placed just as haphazardly. No more than three call center staff manned each office with no routing of calls even if one office had a slow day and another was slammed. Their call center had to be virtual in order to defray the costs of building a centralized call center. Read the whole article at Networkworld.com. The ability to link satellite offices, no matter the size or location, is a way to shrink our big, old world. Information can be shared and instantaneous service can be offered to customers across the globe.
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Virtual Call Center
