More than 40% of the mobile phone users in OECD markets are pre-paid customers. Does this mean that there is equally big size of marginal customers in call center business who would like to use the services of “Virtual Call Centers“? If I go by my intuition, this should be true.
One of the major users of such service would be companies engaged in direct marketing. Ever since American Express began marketing its credit card directly through post, the sales and marketing has evolved further in personal selling by companies like Tupperware, Amway and Oriflame. Such techniques usually have no advertising budget for media, but for parties and rewards. The sales agent in this model is not usually the direct employee of the company. These companies form hierarchy of sales agents from freelancers (usually housewives). The goal for each sales agent is to sell the maximum and add equally good number of sales agents. Such agents do need a call center and definitely they are not ideal to handle the daily functioning of such call centers. These agents have no budgets other than the estimate of how much they earned last month. Such agents are “the” marginal agents who will love the idea of pre-paid contact center. The reason is simple and quite analogous to the reasons mobile companies have pre-paid cards or banks issue debit cards:
- They allow user to monitor their usage
- They can be used by students, immigrants
- They can be used by people who have poor credit ratings
Personal selling agents are just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more home based agents whom I consider “marginal”. They are engaged in selling insurance and sometimes just campaigning for a cause, political and apolitical. These agents get to earn against the number of calls they make or the number of successful sales they make. These agents have very small budgets and very small campaigns that do not even run into weeks. Such agents will definitely like to benefit from a pre-paid account.
And just to add, 3CLogic is one of the few companies who setup pre-paid accounts for this micro-economy community of Virtual Call Centers.
Tags: direct marketing, home based agents, Hosted, pre-paid, SaaS, virtual call center
