Call Center Services

Carrier-supplied voice/data links are the arteries of contact centers, pumping vital information from and to customers, employees, management and staff. One great source for insight on carriers, issues and services, and contact centers are the contact centers themselves.

 

InfoCision (News - Alert) Management Corporation is a leading BPO firm that has 32 centers at 12 locations in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia plus it has home-based agents. Mike Giulivo is InfoCision's Supervisor, I3 Support Call Center Technologies. Here is TMCnet's interview with him.

TMCnet: Outline the services carriers provide for InfoCision

 

MG: InfoCision uses a number of carriers for different services and for different reasons. For instance, for inbound calls we have dedicated circuits from four carriers (Verizon, AT&T (News - Alert), Qwest, and Global Crossing). For outbound calls we primarily use one carrier, Global Crossing.  These carriers also provide other services such as MPLS (Global Crossing (News - Alert) and Verizon) and point-to-point circuits (AT&T, Qwest and Level 3).

Cost and service are the drivers for the selection of services. Carriers typically have different cost structures based on geographic locations and we try to use carriers that will offer the best overall cost for a particular service.  Naturally, the service provided has to work well and have features that further our goals.  Customer support is very big, especially when there are outages.  Our company lives by the delivery of carrier services and if there are problems the carrier we use must have an easy way to report those problems, provide timely updates on the issues and have competent technicians to work with us through any resolution process.

TMCnet: Outline how InfoCision manages its carrier relationships. What are the typical issues that crop up and how do you handle them?

MG: All of our carriers have a local presence and a team of people dedicated to serve our account. These people know us, our business and our needs.  They are aware of the critical role their services play in our business and are ready to do whatever they can to support us.  We work together as partners and they are available to help us plan and deploy new services.  They are very aware of the competitive situation and that they may or may not get specific business from us.  But even when business is won or lost we strive to maintain our relationships because needs change new opportunities arise all the time and they could be the winner or loser the next time around.

We usually meet with our carrier teams in person or via conference call at least once per week to keep track of any outstanding orders or issues.  With our diverse client base there is always some request for some service or routing that one or another carrier may be able to deliver.  They all have particular strengths and unique services that we try to leverage to enhance the services we can deliver to our clients.

Sometimes our clients will drive us to use specific carriers as well. If the client uses a particular carrier and would like to overflow calls to us or have us as one of their routing options it makes sense for us to utilize that carrier too.

TMCnet: What trends are seeing from the carriers in the way of pricing, support, quality, and features and what is driving them?

MG: The carriers are very competitive with services that are very similar.  They all are looking for ways to differentiate themselves. They will try and find that edge to make them more attractive.  Price is huge, especially when carrier services are such a large infrastructure expense. But price will only take you so far, and when the success of the company is riding on the service being provided you look very closely at the support provided and quality of the services (i.e. SLAs) and very often those are the things that will make or break a deal. Specialized services, managed services and leveraging one service to gain cost advantages with another service are the things we have seen lately as the carriers try find their niche.

 

TMCnet: Is InfoCision switching to VoIP for call handling? If so, why?

MG: InfoCision is switching to VoIP for call handling.  We do some today but will be expanding that as we upgrade some of our systems.  We will use VoIP or SIP to process calls from the delivery point from the carrier through to the workstation of the Communicator.  At this point, inbound and outbound calls will be delivered in the traditional way, TDM via DS3 and PRIs and connected to gateways to be converted to IP.  We will likely be converting the inbound traffic from the carriers to IP in the near future as well.  This seems to be a stable offering and has additional routing features that we find desirable.  Using IP trunks for predictive dialing is not a service that most carriers can support today.  The high number of call initiations per second (50 or more) usually outstrips the capacity of the carrier hardware currently in place. That will change in time, but for now we will interface with the carrier via gateways for outbound calls.

TMCnet: Some organizations are abandoning toll-free numbers with the rise of the Internet, VoIP and low-cost calling plans. Are you seeing a fading away of toll-free numbers?

MG: We are not seeing any fading away of toll free numbers.  Not yet. If anything we are managing an ever-growing list of numbers as clients use a toll free number to track the responses to and effectiveness of particular advertising. 

 

However, as the use of other media expands, such as the Internet and company web sites, as well as applications such as text, chat and e-mail, the ability to manage these contact streams becomes important for a company like ours.  As the use of cell phones expands and more people abandon their home land lines, we may see the toll free number become extinct when making a call to any number any where does not have an added cost to the caller.  Then the use of toll free numbers becomes irrelevant.