- Overseas Call Centers - How They Increase Your Bottom Line
A brief explanation of overseas Call Centers and the benefit they have for today's business environment.
The name is almost self-explanatory. Most Call Centers (CC) are overseas. They are usually located in countries where the minimum wage is lower, which is why it is actually more profitable for companies to outsource this commodity. CC's are also a central hub for many phone services that larger companies utilize. This saves them money as those that are American and located in the United States pay higher wages and more taxes.
The centralized office is set up to receive and transmit large volumes of requests that are made via the telephone.
A CC is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outgoing calls for telemarketing, clientele, product services, and debt collection are also made. Other services that may be provided are the collective handling of letters, faxes, live chat, and e-mails which makes the center a Contact Center.
The common names used for finding these companies online are:
International call center(s)
Online Call Centers
Call Center International
Call Center Best
Offshore Call Centers
Web Call Center
Global Call Centers
Overseas Call Centers
Call Center information
Contact Centers
Inbound Call Centers
Outbound Call Centers
The setup for Call Centers, especially those overseas are as follows: Often they are operated in a large open space, sometimes you can hear them all talking in the background. The space is extensive and houses lots of agents or operators, mostly in an open configuration with the agents sitting at a desk and utilizing space as best as possible.
The workers for online CC's are much in the same configuration with headsets for the telephone, and they are all connected to a central switch that allows anyone to ring up the supervisor (who has their own work station) at any moment.
Overseas Call Centers and those in the US can be owned independently, by large corporations, by super large corporations and last but not least a lot of them can be networked together through a corporate computer network. One American firm that has done quite well by outsourcing work to an overseas CC is a company by the name of Cognizant.
Increasingly, the networks are working on the Internet with networks of telephony. Even most people in their home who don't work with overseas CC's have Skype, which is a telephony technology or CTI (computer telephony integration).
Most major businesses use Call Centers to interact with their customers. Examples include utility companies, mail order catalogue retailers, and customer support for computer hardware and software. Some businesses even service internal functions through call centers. Examples of this include help desks, retail financial support, and sales support.
These centers are also know as Customer Interaction Centers and are a central point of any organization from which all customer contacts are managed. Through Contact Centers, valuable information about that particular company is routed to appropriate people, where contacts can be tracked and data can be gathered. It is generally a part of that company's customer relationship management (CRM). Today, customers contact companies by calling, emailing, chatting online, visiting websites, faxing, and even instant messaging.
To be sure, overseas Call Centers are not going anywhere any time soon. Inexpensive, they are the backbone of customer service on the planet today and will remain that way for a long time. The benefits of an organized and well-run CC far outweigh the benefits of keeping one in-house. So if you're operating a business in the US, Canada, England, and Australia it's worth looking into as your bottom line will likely go up.