The ability to make and receive telephone calls is something that many of us take for granted, however, good practice should dictate that every contact centre carries out a full and thorough investigation into the resiliency of their telecoms provider to ensure that if a problem occurs, the ability of the call centre to continue operating isn't significantly compromised. Even if your ability to make and receive telephone calls isn't impacted, the degradation of call quality could have an equal impact on the operation of the call centre as a total telecoms outage. For the reasons specified above, it is of critical importance that questions about redundancy and resiliency are asked of your telecoms provider, and questions about the overall resiliency of your call centre are asked. Below are some examples of the types of questions that you need ask of your telecoms suppliers, and the types of action you should take to ensure resiliency: Read more
Outsourcing is the process of hiring an independent organisation to carry out a business process which was previously performed internally. Outsourcing is very common and is used in a great variety of industries, from animations to IT. It's a useful and valuable way for a company to spend its money, as often it allows that company to focus on more important aspects of their work, saving time and money. For example, someone running an online shop may be more concerned with providing good-quality clothing on time than learning how to create and manage the website, and so would find a separate IT company to do this. Essentially, it's like paying your big brother to do your Maths homework so you can spend more time doing your History project. One particularly common form of outsourcing is placing companies' call centres abroad, typically in countries such as India. Read more
On Monday 2nd July 2012, the BBC aired the Panorama programme - Call Centres Undercover. One of the main themes that this programme explored was the Telephone Preference Service, and whether or not they were achieving their goal of preventing unsolicited calls being made to individuals and businesses that had registered with the TPS service. Read more
The benefits of a mass text messaging service for a business can be huge, and will vary depending on the nature of each organisation. Below are five examples of how bulk SMS delivery can be used to add value to a company and its interaction with its customers. Read more
Over the past couple of decades, we have seen the call centre boom take place in India as centres moved there from more developed countries like the UK. This huge growth has several explanations; firstly the cheapness of using call centres based here, which helps increase companies' incomes. In the UK, the average salary for a worker in a call centre is around £12,500 per year, whereas in India this is just £1,200. The boom was also encouraged within India as it was seen by many as a road to development and a good opportunity for graduates to find work. There is also the wealth of English-speaking workers, with more in India than in the UK and USA combined. Read more
A dialler will call a list of telephone numbers that have been uploaded to it and then connect the call to a person that works within the call centre, typically referred to as an agent. A predictive dialler takes this concept a step further by using complex algorithms that are designed to reduce the amount of time that an agent will spend waiting for the next call, whilst reducing the chances of a call being made to somebody and there being no agent to speak with them. Read more
There are many acronyms used within the call centre industry, often these buzzwords and abbreviations will regularly come up in conversation within this environment. These can be confusing to anyone new to the telecoms industry, hopefully the following glossary will explain a few of the three letter acronyms listed below. Read more
There are many acronyms used within the call centre industry, these can often be very confusing for those people new to the field. The purpose of this article is to therefore explain all of the common buzzwords, jargon and abbreviations that will be found as soon as people start talking about call centres. Read more
Due to the emergence of SIP based telephony and Softswitch technology, coupled with the recent reduction in mobile termination rates, Nexbridge are able to offer some of the most competitive call charges in the industry. Our call charges are so competitive that many contact centres have found our call charges cheaper than their current call charges.
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A virtual call centre is a concept whereby call centre agents do not operate from a single location, but are geographically dispersed instead of operating from work stations within their employer's premises. Typically this scenario works by having all of your call centre agents working from home, or alternatively in smaller groups. This setup doesn't have any impact on the ability of a customer being able to contact one of your contact centre, as calls will automatically be distributed to the remote locations wherever they may be. Many organisations choose this model for a variety of business benefits, including: Read more
