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?

Results Companies Inc. selects Virtual Observer to rapidly create better trained customer service agents

Results Companies, Inc. is a global firm providing outsourced call center services. They started out 18 years ago as a privately held company with a predictive dialer product. As they ended up working more and more with telemarketing agents on an outbound basis, they eventually grew to offer both inbound and outbound call center services. Results Companies now has a “best of breed” product used by front line managers of call centers, helping them produce better trained agents.

In the call center solutions market, finding the right vendor can be a daunting process when your investment will eventually integrate with your existing solutions. This is exactly the scenario which faced Results Companies, Inc. last fall when they set out to select a call recording and quality assurance vendor. They needed a solid solution with robust features which would not only scale with their aggressive growth plans, but also would compliment their outsourced call center offerings.

Results Companies, Inc. also planned to use the features of the call recording and quality monitoring system as a marketing differentiator. Using the quality assurance tools of the new system would enable them to not only handle customers’ inbound and outbound phone traffic, but it would allow them to evaluate the performance of each interaction and provide targeted training back to the agents.

Results Companies looked at a few different call recording systems and eventually chose Virtual Observer (VO) by Coordinated Systems, Inc (CSI).

“We were looking for a call recording and quality monitoring solution that our team would be comfortable with,” said Alec Brecker, Chief Operations Office at Results Companies. “Virtual Observer offered everything we wanted to do at an attractive economic value. We wanted something that would be easy to use, so as we scaled up, it would be something that wouldn’t hinder our growth.” Click here to read more...