Call Centers

When most people think of a call center, they think of the calls they get when sitting down to dinner to buy a timeshare. But whether you know it or not, your business has a call center. Any employee with a job description that includes "answers incoming calls" is a call center agent. The only question you have to ask is whether there are enough calls coming in to justify getting the tools that will help you take calls faster and with higher quality responses.

There are two main types of call centers: inbound and outbound. An inbound call center takes incoming calls, and outbound call center makes calls to outside parties. There are also what are termed blended call centers, where the agents will perform both functions.

Inbound call centers can be customer service departments, tech support numbers, sales inquiries coming from a published number on a website, complaint hot lines, service departments, or even your receptionist if you only have one published number. The major questions with inbound call centers include the number of calls being handled, the quality of these calls, and how these calls were handled or directed. Inter-Tel's Automatic Call Distribution and Contact Center Suite products were designed with the call center in mind, and can help companies direct calls to agents efficiently and review the performance of their agents.

For outbound call centers, some major applications include sales, marketing, confirmations, fund-raising and quality control. What many customers find is that sitting and waiting for the telephone to ring, email and fax blasting, and direct mail are effective but have either unpredictable or very low response rates. Companies that rely on appointments (realtors, medical offices, contractors, auto repair) find that they see between 25% and 50% of their time wasted by no-shows, but may not want to hire someone to confirm appointments and manage scheduling. Many non-profits depend on donations for their operations, and spend vast amounts of money mailing solicitations, or hosting telethons without properly tracking how many calls they are actually making. Companies such as car dealerships, professional service companies, and home and commercial service trades are often interested in how their personnel performed but conventional methods (mailing a questionnaire) are expensive and have very low response rates. All of these business problems can be solved by call center equipment.

We sell a variety of products for outbound call centers.

• Inter-Tel's Auto Dialer is a PC that calls an imported list of numbers and can play a prerecorded message or a dynamic message based on the imported contact list, and also allow the contact called to connect to live agents as well as provide reports on the campaign performance to managers.

• Inter-Tel's Power Dialer allows a PC to dial for live agents using an imported contact list, saving agents from the tedium of manually dialing a list of numbers and also managing the agent's time more effectively.

• TeleDirect's Liberation predictive dialer will dial lists of contacts for your agents, as well as providing a scripting interface and integration with your back-end software applications. This device can also function as an auto/emergency dialer for educational facilities, with complete integration with the Inter-Tel Axxess and Samsung 100/500 line of PBXs.

• Inter-Tel's Contact Center Suite is a family of products that provide real-time and historical reporting, PC desktop call control for agents and supervisors, integration with software applications and contact management software, real-time dynamic call routing, reporting across multiple locations and devices, and email inquiry reporting and routing.

• Inter-Tel's Axxess, 5000 and 7000 platforms provide built-in features that enhance any business with a call center, such as built-in automatic call distribution for creating "hunt groups" dedicated to answering calls to specific numbers, dynamic hold messages for waiting customers, letting them know how many calls are ahead of them, advanced monitoring capabilities for supervisors, and much, much more.

Extenda has worked with call centers with roles ranging from telephone sales to package tracking to every possible permutation of customer service inquiry. We have the tools for every budget and every type of call center - give us a call today for a free demonstration and proposal!