A new feature of the call center is ‘Agent Group’. Agent Group is a feature that refers to the process of distributing calls to group of agents. It is a concept used to select which agent group will receive the calls. The call center’s costs depend upon leads. Therefore leads should be connected with the proficient agents. Agent group makes this easy to configure. If you want to make leads more useful, it should be received by the proficient agents. Agent group is appended to connect the leads with the proficient agents.

Feature of Agent Group:-

1. With the agent group, you can make the group of agents instead of consider an agent separately.
2. After making the agent groups, it is easy to apply attributes on the basis of agent group.
3. Agent group of call center agents provides more flexibility to apply policies on the agents.

It increases the performance of the call center.

1. It is nice to use agent group to get reports of the called leads on the basis of agent groups.
2. All the agents will not be allowed to utilize the policies, only those agents are permitted who are assigned to this agent group.

For example:-

Suppose that there are bulks of leads in which some leads belong to those persons who know Spanish and some leads belong to those persons who know english. It is required the first type of leads should be received by those agents who are good in Spanish language and second type of leads should be received by those agents who know english better.

Agent group can make this configuration possible. This feature categories the level of agents of the call center based on the quality of them.

It’s mandatory for a call center to manage these leads properly and transform these leads into potential customers. It is not only brand loss, but even wastage of important lead, if the call center agents approaches it at an inappropriate time (as per his/her time zone). Most of the times, it has been found that your hot lead may turn into your competitors customer, if you call it an hour prior.

In simple words, leads are contact details of a potential customer whom the agent needs to contact. These leads are basically package deal which carries a lot of information that may enable an agent to convert every opportunity into a profitable customer.

Right from lead acquisition to post sales reporting, 3CLogic provides best solutions by tracking HOT leads first and closing them as sales. For others, prioritizing consistent lead follow ups with easy to apply recycling policies.  This is how we manage our leads in a better way:

1. Lead Acquisition
   Lead Acquisition 
 Lead sources could be distinct. They could come from Web based forms or via formatted batch data files like Microsoft Excel or CSV. 3CLogic provides sophisticated Lead import functionalities to cover all these areas. One can easily embed lead collection widgets into web pages of their marketing partners, or into campaign banners, prospective customers can fill in their information right there and turn into HOT leads of your system. Available agent calls these leads and converts them into sales.(More on Click-4-Agent here)
2. Lead Tracking
   Imported leads in the System can be tracked quickly using various search options, besides customized filters provide an efficient way to track the exact lead you are looking for. Filtered leads can be grouped together into lead lists and this provides one of the best ways to cluster up your leads into different groups and manage each of them accordingly.
3. Lead Updates
   For large organizations, where each agent deals with hundreds of leads daily it’s an effort to update leads related data. As every lead that has got changed after it was imported into the system (changed his email, her address etc), this effort un-folded for each agent dealing with his own batch of assigned leads is substantial. System should be up to date always and agents should not waste time by contacting incorrect numbers. Bulk lead update feature of 3CLogic allows modifying multiple lead attributes efficiently. Various update sources can be merged to trigger bulk update of leads in just no time.

No Matter how you are generating your sales leads, if you are not managing them properly you could be simply wasting money. 3Clogic ports all the best of features into one application that can help you to improve the way you handle your leads.

3G is next generation of mobile communication system, is a family of standards for  mobile telecommunications by international telecommunication Union. Unlike the Wi-Fi which you can use when you are in hotspot zone, you need to subscribe the 3G service from your mobile service provider. Most of the time they offer data plan for 3G services.

What 3G can do apart from normal phone function ?

• Mobile TV – a provider redirects a TV channel directly to the subscriber’s phone where it can be watched.
• Video on demand – a provider sends a movie to the subscriber’s phone.
• Video conferencing – subscribers can see as well as talk to each other.
• Tele-medicine – a medical provider monitors or provides advice to the potentially isolated subscriber.
• Location-based services – a provider sends localized weather or traffic conditions to the phone, or the phone allows the subscriber to find nearby businesses or friends.
• High-speed Web

3G and Voice

Internet is a source of free and cheap calls worldwide save a lot of money due to the latest telephony application and service. 3G had edge of being connected while you are on move. Internet/connectivity is available all the time on your portable device. User with 3G device and plan is well-equipped with internet thus free/cheap calls. All you need mobile application on your device and you are ready to make calls. Lots of free applications are available for this purpose.

3G and Call Center

So imagine days when a agent can answer you call sitting in a cafeteria. You don’t have to spend a single penny for any kind of hardware for setting up call center. It’s just a glimpse what future looks like.

• Huge initial setup cost of the Call Center
• Expensive hardware
• Hiring experts on the product for maintenance and support
• Planning for scalability, which might result in buying expensive equipment in advance
• Strategy to Ramp up and Ramp down quickly
• Cost of minutes (Telecom minutes)

These are just a couple of expenses, if we go on with the list, it is huge .  3Clogic fits in brilliantly as a risk mitigating solution to these complex business problems because

• No expensive hardware required One just needs a Windows desktop PC to get the needful done.
• With Hosted call center, no maintenance and support team required.
• Scalable one can increase or decrease the number of agents as and when required.
• Ramp up and Ramp down as per need. One does not need to invest in expensive hardware or more over purchase hardware that is never used.
• Choose a provider, who gives you the best deal!
• Keep many backup providers.
• Strategise least cost routing using multiple providers for multiple destinations- big saving!
• Office building not required as agents can work from home.
• Pay as you go option

Well, Do I still hear someone say “Risk”

One of the clients who called us back was Oasis Marketing. Oasis Marketing does outbound calling. They wanted to run a 36 hour campaign over the weekend when we wanted to do maintenance. Another 3CLogic customer, Digital Bridge Communications based out of Ashburn, Virginia, was bracing for the blizzard of 2010 that weekend. They wanted their customer support folks to work from home while still providing the usual weekend coverage and support to their clients.

These were just few of the many examples, who could not have any kind of extended maintenance window even if it was pre-scheduled. 3CLogic quickly put a SWAT team in place, which started brainstorming ways to minimize or eliminate the downtime required for this extended maintenance window. Just as the blizzard moved into the DC metro area, we moved all the customers to backup servers. We took the production servers and started performing upgrades and maintenance on them. As soon as the maintenance was completed, we moved all the customers back to the upgraded servers. Result: Zero impact on our customers’ business. SaaS for mission critical application like call centers really means 99.999 up time.

1. The company had planned its annual off-site meet of agents with their families during month end at Las Vegas, Nevada
2. The company had failed to meet its sales target for the month. They were already into week 3 and meeting next week meant losing account, if they failed to catch up last month.
3. Agents were bored with monotonous work and off-site meet was company’s idea to break this monotony.
4. The agents were really looking forward to this break at LA.

Steve, the account manager was restless and worried. He is certain that he needs to cancel the company off-site trip knowing that would not go down well with the agents. He decides to break the news to the agents post lunch.

Steve settles down for lunch and picks up a copy of the newspaper, flips around and hits upon an article on “Portable Devices” elaborating the way laptops, notebooks, mobile phones etc changed our life……and Bingo! He knows what needs to be done! 
The distributed dialer solution from 3clogic that his company incorporated a couple of months back was a solution to his business management problem!……..He thinks aloud in his mind – “For one week we are porting our contact center to Las Vegas”
So he proposes a deal to the agents:

1. Morning 9AM to 2PM they make sales calls.
2. Evening’s they enjoy Las Vegas.

“So what do we need to carry with us?” questions an agent, Steve says “minimal equipment, one laptop per agent and a headset…..That’s it!”… Smiles, your browser may not support display of this image.

The resort Bally’s, on the strip in Las Vegas,  where they proposed to stay had Wi-Fi connections in all rooms, that’s all they would need to get down to work, the central hosted management portal would still be able to do lead management, live monitoring and reporting!
Steve ran the contact center from Las Vegas for a week, coupled with team building exercise in the evening, they made 32% more sales than any week they had in the previous year and before I forget, yes they did meet the target.

On the last day of the week, when Steve met his agents for dinner, he raised a toast with his bottle of beer … all he said was “Cheers!”

Persistent sales still successfully runs the account and yes Portable contact centers is not fiction! Distributed Dialers and Telephony Application Grid from 3clogic, makes this a cake walk!

For contact center technology vendors such as 3CLogic, social media provides an opportunity to bring new capabilities to contact centers. Optimizing the use of social media channel in contact centers requires integration of social media capabilities into existing call center platforms. New agent and supervisory skills are essential for the social media channel to work effectively in contact centers. Continuous monitoring of buzz and chatter on net combined with the appropriate reaction and response from the call center is paramount to the success of social media as a channel in contact centers. The speed with which the contact center must respond to the buzz and chatter cannot be underestimated. Adoption of social media in contact centers can be challenging and overwhelming for their decision makers. Technology vendors like 3CLogic can help call centers take the next step in the right direction.

With SaaS, enterprises can now truly rent software and pay only for what and when they use and still get all the financial advantages of leasing the software. In case of Contact Centers, 3CLogic has come up with innovative models to make SaaS truly attractive from a financial perspective.

1) Customers can rent Contact Center seats on a monthly basis. They pay a monthly subscription fee per seat for the use of Contact Center software. The model is similar to how salesforce.com charges for its SaaS. In case of Contact Center SaaS from 3CLogic, the customer pays an additional fee for call termination, outbound application or toll free service charges for inbound application. It’s customer’s responsibility to manage the number of seats they will be using from one month to next. They can increase or decrease the number of seats in any given month. This model provides tremendous amount of flexibility to the customer – they only pay for the seats that they use and when they use it.

2) It is well known that the attrition rate in Contact Centers is one of the highest in the business world. When a Call Center agent quits or is terminated, it is still necessary to retain all the statistics and analytics associated with his or her ID; at least for a few months. In some marketing companies, the telemarketers are frequently active for a few months and then become inactive for some time, only to return back after a few months. In such situations, the enterprise may find it difficult to keep track of active and inactive seats on a monthly basis; and which IDs to retain for tracking purposes and which IDs to be deactivated. 3CLogic offers a purely usage based model. The Enterprise only pays for the total number of hours the agents are logged into the hosted Call Center Service.

3) The third model that is tied to the usage works is as follows. The total number of call termination minutes are calculated for the entire Call Center in any given month and the enterprise is charged a fee based on the number of minutes consumed. This per minute charge consists of both software charge plus a charge for call termination for outbound application, or toll free service charges in case of an inbound application.

3CLogic offers these kinds of flexible business models because its platform is designed to be a multi-tenant platform from the ground up. The original design took into account that every tenant on its hosted service is going to have different technical and business requirements.

3CLogic’s distributed computing platform has been designed not only to address a variety of technical and business requirements, but the results are delivered to the customer in a matter of days, as opposed to months and years it takes with traditional Call Center platforms.