Notes and News on distributed call centers, infomercials, Skype and MS Office online

According to a news story on Earthtimes, "4 out of 5" of the top infomercials are outsourcing their call centers to LiveOps.com. Speaking of infomercials, I wonder if Giuseppe Franco (if you've ever watched a Yankees game on Yes, you know who I'm talking about!) answers the incoming phone order lines for his hair products?

LiveOps is a "distributed" contact center, meaning its' agents are dispersed virtually across states and countries. LiveOps offers customers real-time Reporting, on-demand scalability, superior quality home agents and results-based routing.

Maynard Webb, CEO, formerly of Ebay, stated "We are thrilled to be working with these very successful shows. It's clearly a testament to our technology as well as the quality of our virtual community of home agents. Because of this unique combination, no other contact centers can handle the call volatility that goes along with this industry."

In related news, Ebay posted a loss on Skype, which many are now declaring a failure. You can read more about in this blog rant.

Speaking of a distributed call center, wouldn't it make sense for telecommuters to use an online office suite vs. having them use an installed client version of Microsoft Office? With the new online version of Office or with the Google Apps suite, there are no installation issues, missing files, or availability issues. Have you tried the online apps? The Google Docs, Spreadsheets and Presentations apps are pretty simple to use and it's convenient for sharing docs with family members or between work and home PCs. Software as a service is becoming a reality. You only need to see Microsoft jumping on the concept for proof positive.

Home agent field growing rapidly

As opposed to outsourcing call center operations to international companies, many companies are now "homeshoring" to united states-based firms. If you extend this trend to the emerging South American and Latin American call center market, you can see industry analysts claiming there's a revolution occuring.

Spurring this trend to homeshoring, or "homesourcing" is the availability of technology to properly train, network and manage home-based agents. This allows the outsourced call center to rapidly expand operations, and the number of agents used, while maintaining low overhead costs.

In a story on TMCnet a leading distributed contact center technology and services provider in the U.S., announced today that the company is contracting with more than 16,000 home-based customer service and sales agents, or home agents. The company expects that number to reach 20,000 agents by year-end.

CSI has recently implemented Virtual Observer in a number of outsourced call center environments, allowing them to record calls and manage quality assurance.

It was only a matter of time...

...before call centers became service providers to the fast food industry. Read the article on USAtoday.

Now when you order your burger, fries, and large diet coke, or a #3 meal, your call may be routed through a call center located virtually anywhere.

This can only point to a trend I've noticed: the rapid emergence of the specialized call center outsource service industry. I've seen a surging number of new call center service providers crop up, not only internationally but also domestically. Latin America has also become a major player in this area.

In a mostly unrelated topic, I've just returned from my honeymoon in Mexico. We were in the Cancun region. Everyone in that hundred mile region seemed to be involved in the tourism industry (I discovered, thanks to our tour guide, that Cancun was only 20 or so years old). Everybody was extremely friendly and everyone seemed to take customer service to the next level. If Mexico ever wanted to diversify their regions' marketscape, I would highly recommend the outsourced call center business model.

Who wouldn't want to answer customer service phone calls when they had an office view of the Mayan Riviera?