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Posts Tagged ‘call center’

Hosted Contact Center… Say Wha?: Cloud call centers for beginners

Friday, December 30th, 2011

When I first started here at 3CLogic, I couldn’t tell you the difference between a traditional brick and mortar call center from a hosted contact center. “Hosted? What’s a hosted”? I soon came to learn all of the new and exciting call center capabilities that are available to companies looking to start or revamp their existing call centers. With all these technological advancements in place today, a hosted contact center seems to be the ideal solution to pricey traditional call center infrastructure costs.

It’s clear how I feel about outsourced agents; (Don’t remember? Take a look at last week’s post to get a friendly summary) it’s almost easier to try and troubleshoot on your own then calling an outsourced support line to only receive a lack of support, and a blow to your wallet. That’s the beauty with hosted contact centers. As a contact center business, you have complete flexibility and scalability to fit your individual business demands. Want your call center on premise? Want to have your agents hosted from various locations to eliminate hefty infrastructure fees? Want a hybrid solution of both on premise and remote locations? I’d hate to steal the slogan but… this ain’t Burger King, but you can most certainly have it your way.

Deploying a hosted contact center is ideal for a company looking to deploy and launch their contact center operations within a matter of hours. Pricing is scalable too, which means you have the benefit of paying for what you use and what you use only, on a per month basis. Various solution providers such as 3CLogic, provide companies with call center software to effectively and efficiently run their call centers with ease. Home agents can be trained and tested with online 3CLogic certification courses which allow administrators to evaluate agent skill and performance. This is done to efficiently match the most qualified agents with valued customers. By taking that extra step with agent management, managers ensure that their customers end their transactions with a solved issue, and a smile on their face. Ahh, how refreshing is that? How many times can you honestly say that you’ve had a pleasant experience with a customer support issue with outsourced agents? You have a story, we want to hear it!

Want an overview on Hosted Contact Center features and functionalities? Find more information–> http://www.3clogic.com/existing.html#proja

Tags: 3CLogic, brick and mortar, call center, Hosted, Hosted Contact Center, Outsourced
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Why do I need 3CLogic if I already have CRM?

Wednesday, October 26th, 2011

You are using Salesforce or another type of CRM software to help you manage your sales team. You can view the history of interactions with customers, every product they have purchased, all opportunities in the pipeline and every sale you have won/lost. You can also run some neat reports that you can share with your management team.
However, there has been no increase in sales after you implemented the CRM system. Not only were the setup costs high, but your sales associates were bogged down with training for almost a week. These prices in addition to recurring monthly installments can add up to significant amounts. To understand why you have not been able to take advantage of the productivity software, answer the following questions about your sales team and process:
S. No Question about sales process Answer
1 Each sales rep follows their own sales cycle to close T or F
2 Each sales rep has their own scripts for calls T or F
3 The sales team has met or exceeded sales expectations in the last month, quarter year T or F
4 Face to face meetings with customers are critical for closing sales T or F
5 The sales reps capture all interactions with customers on CRM T or F
6 I have full visibility into their daily activities; how many calls they make, if they are busy on calls or doing other work T or F
7 I know how many of these calls were conversations versus busy, no-answer, leaving a message on answering machine or the customer saying, “call me back at a better time” T or F
8 I have access to all my ‘Sale’ calls including recordings and can use them for training T or F

If you have answered False to most or all of the questions, the problem is not with your CRM software but how you manage your inside sales team. You need to augment your CRM system with a contact center which gives you the inside view into your sales team.
Would you like to know:
S. No Question Y or N
1. How many calls they make: daily, weekly and monthly without relying on the self-reporting by reps?
2. How many calls are conversations where the sales process is moving forward?
3. How much time they spend making calls, chatting with customers, emailing customers?
4. If they are following the scripts and sales process that was give to them as part of expensive training?
5. If they are busy making frequent calls to their girlfriends/friends using the phone system or making customer calls during office hours
6. If you can listen to live calls that your agents are having with the customers to see if they are following the script?
7. If the follow-up calls moving the sale forward or backward?
8. If you can coach the rep on live calls to close a deal before it is too late?
9. If there is a way to download the call or chat recordings and use them for training purposes?
10. How there would minimal or no cost for training reps when implement the contact center solution?
If the answer to most of these questions is ‘yes’, then you need to look at 3CLogic’s contact center software hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help manage your sales team actively and increase sales. Integrating this multi-channel software with your existing CRM solutions will provide the necessary productivity gains for you; guaranteed.

For more information, please contact 3CLogic at 800-350-8656 or info@3clogic.com. http://www.3clogic.com.
About 3CLogic:
3CLogic, headquartered in Rockville, Md., is a leading provider of cloud based call center and social media applications for interactive e-commerce transactions. 3CLogic adds voice, chat and text capabilities to any e-commerce transaction on social media networks and combines them with a cloud based contact center solution. 3CLogic’s Inbound Cloud Call Center and Hosted Predictive Dialer, combined with cloud technologies, helps companies of all sizes increase sales and provide better customer service. For more information, please contact 3CLogic at 800-350-8656 or info@3clogic.com. http://www.3clogic.com.

Media Contact
Taryn Cheatham
3CLogic
tcheatham@3clogic.com

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Tags: 3CLogic, call center, Cloud, contact center, CRM, Dialer
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Why do we need voice on social media?

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

With technology advancing every day, people are flocking by the millions to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. They use these outlets to obtain information such as recent news, to interact with friends, or even leave comments on articles written by strangers. Once they are logged in to these social media sites, they will do all of their tasks on the webpage without ever leaving. This is very similar to large gatherings, meetings, or even to shoppers visiting a local mall.

Due to the fact that money is where the customers are, merchants are sure to follow these crowds of people buzzing around on the social media sites. By getting in tune with the new market demands and paying close attention to what consumers want, merchants can more easily and efficiently raise their productivity. During the summer months in Washington D.C., you can find millions of tourists gathering to see the sites and monuments it has to offer. This means that there are also hundreds if not thousands of merchants also offering their services or selling wares.

Whenever people visit public places such as D.C., they tend to end up staying around for some time. They also will more than likely plan another trip to visit the area again at some point in the future. This is an ideal outlet for merchants because they can boost their profits off of these returning customers and slowly move in as well. At some point in time, the customers who start buying services on social media sites will require assistance and need a representative or help support line to answer any questions or concerns. If there is no efficient way for customers to interact with these merchants, productivity lowers and profits decrease. The big customers and businesses such as Delta, JC Penney, and Toys r US have present pages on facebook but also have big call centers to provide support, answer questions and run customer outreach programs.

For those merchants or business owners who need to provide call center services but cannot afford to setup their own service have a choice now, 3CLogic’s new talkEase facebook widget. With this widget, you as a merchant can gain lasting relationships with your customers, gain trust and more efficiently offer support and services to your prospective customers by adding voice to your Facebook pages. Using this widget, you can reach prospects and customers by providing instant interactions and exceptional service. Your customers will be thrilled when they put in less work and receive more support from your end. This widget will be placed on your Facebook page and will contain customizable tabs of your choosing.

Holding a contest? Want a tab for your customers to make reservations? Wish to provide customer or technical support in an easily accessible location? These tabs will be customized to fit your needs. Use this widget to:
*Increase the number of “likes” on your Facebook page.
*Bring traffic to your page to promote new services to both prospects and existing customers.
*Enhance productivity rates by increasing communication with your customers.
*Get to know your customers to build lasting relationships and trust.

Here is the link to talkEase demo video which demonstrates the new Facebook widget:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150144236899534&oid=242779261005&comments

Interested? Please send us an e-mail to sales@3clogic, and we will get you started. Or, please visit 3CLogic’s Facebook page, click “like” and then locate the tab titled “Facebook Business Package” and enter in your name and phone number to connect with a talkEase representative.

Tags: 3CLogic, call center, sales, social media, Voice
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3CLogic – Managing Your Business Leads

Sunday, April 18th, 2010

Leads are at the base of business activities when it comes to call center solutions. This is especially the case for outbound campaigns. More or less, all contact center companies strive for the same key goal: converting leads into new customers.
After acquiring leads, it is mandatory for a call center to manage these leads properly in order to transform them from leads to potential customers. If a lead is contacted at an inappropriate time, (as per time zone of the agent, perhaps), they could grow frustrated with your contact center and opt out of your goods and services. This is not only a lost lead for you, but also the start of a negative chain of referrals that customer will share about your business. Contacting leads at informal times or interacting with them at times not suitable with their time zone can leave them opting out of your call center services, and opting in for you competitor’s services instead.
In simple words, leads are contact details of a potential customer whom the agent needs to contact. These leads are basically a package deal which carries a lot of information that may enable an agent to convert every opportunity into a profitable customer.
From the start of lead acquisition right down to post sales reporting, 3CLogic provides the best solutions by tracking HOT leads right away and closing them as sales. For others, it means prioritizing consistent lead follow ups with easy to apply recycling policies. 3CLogic manages leads in a more beneficial and effective way:

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 to allow prospective customers to be able to fill in their information giving you new and hot leads to follow up with. An available agent then calls these leads and converts them into sales.(More on Click-4-Agent here)
Lead Tracking
Imported leads in the system can be tracked quickly using various search options. Customized filters provide an efficient way to track the exact lead you are looking for. Filtered leads can be grouped together into lead lists, thus providing one of the best ways to cluster up your leads into different groups and manage each of them accordingly.
Lead Updates
For large organizations in which each agent deals with hundreds of leads daily, it can be extremely taxing to manually edit each individual lead’s information. As lead details are constantly updated and changed after being imported into the system (changed his email, her address etc), it would require a sufficient amount of time for agents to edit these details. It is imperative that contact center software is always on demand and up to date, eliminating any leads to be called incorrectly. The bulk lead update feature of the 3CLogic software allows modifying multiple lead attributes easy. In addition, various update sources can be merged to trigger a bulk update of leads in just a matter of minutes.

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 breed features into one application to help you efficiently and successfully manage your leads.

Tags: 3CLogic, call center, sales
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Delivering SaaS 24X7

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

3CLogic offers call center solution with Software as a Service (SaaS) model. Like any other SaaS provider we have our regular maintenance window every Sunday morning from 12am EST to 4 AM EST. As you can imagine, running a call center is a critical mission and any downtime even if it is a scheduled one needs to be minimized. 3CLogic is well aware of its customer profile and the mission critical nature of the call center application that it offers. Since past two years, we have not done any extended maintenance on our servers. Recently we added a lot of new features and also redesigned the underlying database structure. This required an extended maintenance window than the usual four hours on Sunday morning. We sent out a notice to all our customers indicating that we would need a longer window to perform maintenance. The response we received completely surprised us. Several of our customers called back and said that longer maintenance window will have a serious impact on their business.

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.

Tags: 3CLogic, call center, SaaS, SaaS Call Center Solution Maintenance Window, Software as a Service
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3CLogic – What’s in a Name?

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

Often people raise a question that what does 3CLogic stand for or what does it mean? Frankly there is no logic behind choosing 3CLogic as a name. Originally the 3Cs stood for ‘Communications, Convergence and Collaboration’. It gradually evolved into Customers, Communications and Collaboration. I like ‘Customers’ in 3C as it is about how we listen to our customers and cover that extra mile to make them happy. An old friend of mine from my days at Newbridge recently asked me if 3C stands for ‘Call Center in the Cloud’. I like that interpretation too. So whatever we were thinking when we came up with 3C in 3CLogic seems to be all good. So the next question is why 3CLogic and not C3Logic. Well, there is logic behind that one. C3Logic would be behind Aspect and Avaya when listed alphabetically and we just couldn’t have that. If you are still wondering why 3CLogic and not just 3C as a name; well there was really no logic in putting logic in 3CLogic. It just sounds logically cool. If your head is spinning by now you have been thinking about all this naming stuff too logically. Besides, what’s in a name anyway? A rose by any other name…..

Tags: 3CLogic, 3clogic Avaya Aspect Call Center Cloud, call center
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Social Media in Contact Centers: Another Channel or Another Force Fit

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

Social media is not just abuzz, but it is also being used to create a lot of buzz about everything. Let’s take a peep into how social media can play a significant role in next-gen contact centers. From a contact center’s perspective that is providing customer service, taking orders, or doing outbound telemarketing campaigns, social media is another channel that ensures contact with customer. Just like phone, e-mail, Instant Messaging and fax channel, social media is yet another platform to get in touch with the end customer. Treating social media as just another channel can be deceiving for the call center as it is a new channel and its use may not be properly understood by the call center. There is a viral element to social media that can have ramifications; both positive and unwanted. Social media when used as another channel in contact centers can certainly provide a 360 degree view of a company’s client base if it is managed properly and is part of an overall strategy to enhance customer touch.

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.

Tags: 3CLogic, call center, channel, contact center, social media
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Security And Data Lock-In Concerns with Software as a Service (SaaS)

Friday, January 29th, 2010

Whenever I read an article about SaaS or participate in a discussion that has anything to do with SaaS, concerns about security and data lock-in always surface at some point. When call center software is being delivered as SaaS and if the client application is in the financial industry, security requirements may even become show stoppers for the call center service to be delivered as a cloud service. The financial client may mandate that confidential customer information such as credit card numbers and social security numbers cannot be transmitted or stored outside of the customer premise. Traditionally such stringent security requirements dictated that the call center solution be deployed on customer’s premise. Only if there was a solution that would let the financial customer have the cake and eat it too i.e. opt for the call center solution as SaaS while ensuring that sensitive customer information never leaves its premise.

Marrying distributed computing architecture for a call center solution with SaaS, it is possible for customers to have their cake and eat it too. With a distributed computing architecture for call centers, sensitive and confidential information is stored on-premise close to where the call processing is happening on agent’s desktop. And non-sensitive information about that customer record such as name and phone number is stored in the cloud and used as a pointer to fetch sensitive information from a local database or a CRM application when the call is connected. All the management, reporting and analytics for the call center is still delivered from the cloud. Sensitive and confidential information such as call recordings are stored locally on customer premise instead of storing these in the cloud. This is possible because with a distributed architecture there is no centralized dialer operating in the cloud. Recordings are done on agent’s PC where the call processing is also done and the recordings are streamed to a local server for retrieval later on. If all this sounds like “just-in-time” security for call center SaaS, it is. And it is made possible by combining distributed computing with cloud computing services.

Tags: call center, Cloud Computing Services, Dialer, SaaS, SaaS security call center CRM financial services credit card numbers social security numbers, Software as a Service
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