Key Performance Metrics for an Outbound Call Center in India

Some time back, we started our discussion with data points for an Inbound call center in India. We highlighted what has been our experience across customers for an Inbound Call Center - http://blog.cloudagent.in/2013/03/key-data-points-to-consider-while.html

In this article today, we will discuss our experiences with Outbound Call Centers and Key performance Metrics you can look at before deciding on your Outbound Process.We will compare Outbound Dialing between a Manual Process  and an Automated Dialer.

Manual Dialing :An Agent types a customer number and manually dials a call to a customer.

Automated Dialer: Data of customers to be dialed is uploaded via an Excel sheet or with an integration to the dialer API. Dialer automatically dials the customer calls when the agent is free.

Stats for Manual Dialing:

When Agents have dialed Manually, it is found that they are achieving a success rate of 55% connected calls. Also, they are spending almost 20% time wrapping the call which means that the outbound processes need more data inputs than a regular process and hence agents need more time to wrap the calls. Agent Utilization is roughly around 30% excluding the regular process activity.

Stats for Automated Dialing: 

Interestingly, even automated dialer gives almost the same amount of success rate in terms of connected calls. Agent Utilization is significantly higher at 68%. When using a dialer, agents are found to dispose the calls faster thus reducing the Wrap up time duration. ( comparison was made in the same outbound process )

Conclusions:

Automated dialer scores significantly higher in terms of agent utilization.

But depending on the Outbound process, customers have often chosen Manual Dialing like when agent has to scrutinize the case before dialing to that customer. Though the above stats give an idea on the agent efficiency you can achieve using a tool , depending on how your process flow is ( which is the superseding factor) the choice can tilt in favor of Manual dialing even though efficiency is lower than automated dialing.

Virtual Call Center for a leading bus ticketing & software solutions provider in India

Going ahead with the Cloud Agent success stories, we will cover one of the first movers to Cloud Agent (http://cloudagent.in ). 

The customer is well known in the bus industry across operators and users. They are one of the first and  pioneers in providing end-to-end software and other value added solutions for the Bus Transport Industry by leveraging the latest technologies. The company also provides technology solutions to more than 50 large private bus operators in India, 4 state transport corporations and 2 international operators. The end-to-end software solutions include e-ticketing systems, fleet management solutions, vehicle tracking systems, passenger information systems, logistics management backed by a 24x7 customer support centre.

They were operating support centers for all their bus operators. The key challenge for them was to identify to which bus operator the call is for and accordingly give a welcome message. Also visual feedback to the agent on the name of bus operator etc was not available and hence agents had to just say a " Good morning" instead of the desired " Good morning, welcome to xyz travels". 

Apart from this, for the state transport corporations providing Toll Free number integrations with a auto redundancy was a major challenge. Once the customer moved to the cloud, Ozonetel was able to offer backup routing from another city in case of the primary landing number ( PRI line ) going down. 

The key benefits derived are:

1. Customer was able to run a call center with the same set of agents for multiple operators 
2. Auto fail over for Toll Free Numbers 
3. Intelligent IVR which recognizes the operator for whom the call is and accordingly plays the messages 
4. Centralized reporting which gave management access to intelligent reports which helped in the scaling process. 

The customer was able to scale with our platform from a initial set of 5 agents to 120+ agents now. We are proud to have been able to help the customer scale at this level and also continue to serve them for the last 2 years. 

For a detailed case study, please download from - http://ozonetel.com/casestudies.php . Select the document as 'Travel'

Introducing Cloud Based Contact Center

Contact Center earlier use to be an option for any business providing customer services, but now with customers more aware and used to such services it has become mandatory. Domestic businesses with lower margin and higher volume, investing into setting up contact center is big overhead. Beside keeping up pace with changing technology and meeting customer expectation can be exhausting.  Cloud Contact Center services  precisely addresses all such business requirements, without hurting the business margins.


Ozonetel CloudAgent is an in-house developed platform, built for cloud contact center solution. It offers best of the breed technology and increased up time for your contact center at a very efficient pay as you use price.

CloudAgent Offers

1. Inbound contact center with its Multi-tenant, Multi-location Intelligent routing capable ACD.
2. Outboud Dialers (Preview and Progressive)
3. Dynamic IVR,  any complex IVR can be implemented using any web application technology with simple Kookoo API's (www.kookoo.in)
4. Integrated SMS Gateway using Kookoo API
5. Integrated Fax -  send and receive using Kookoo API
6. Integrated Payment Gateway IVR for credit card payment collection
7. CloudAgent API that provides beyond CTI capabilities to the platform for any third party system integration (CRM, Business application etc)
8. Interaction Analyst, integrated web enabled contact center analytic tools that offer 360' view of your contact center process. It offer various online dashboards, more than 200 graphical and tabular reports and integrated voice logger. 
9. Real-time dashboards provides the real time view of your contact center. All critical information such as queue status, abandoned call, agent availability and current performance, and much more is available online.

Key Advantage "Its built for Cloud"

No Servers to be installed,No wiring to be done, No weeks of purchase and provisioning , No Huge setup cost's...All of this and much more.


With Cloud Model in, provisioning PRIs, setting up ACD/IVR, setting up call loggers, installing phoneset are all things of past. Just sign up for CloudAgent and your contact center is up and running.


With Cloud Agent we have enabled customer call center's within 30 minutes inclusive of integration to their CRM, providing seamless experience to the customer.

Why Cloud Contact Center?

Factors	Traditional Brick & Mortar Call center	Virtual Call Center
Cost of running a call center	CAPEX + AMC + Monthly rentals	Monthly rentals with zero CAPEX
Minimum Agents	10 to 15	1
Risk of Capital	Very High as CAPEX once spent is gone	Very Low
System Upgrades	Have to be customized and done locally	Centrally adminstered system
Change Management	No instant upgrades for new features- Takes time	Instant upgrades to all customers
Scale As you like & Pay as you scale	NO OPTION LIKE THIS	Scale and shrink as per your business requirement
Instant Activation	No- Activation time ranges from a week to 3 months	Activation within 30 minutes

• Cost of running a call center:  There is a huge difference in the way you spend. A cloud based call center just needs a fixed rental to be paid where as the archaic variety require a CAPEX,AMC and sometimes monthly rentals as well. The positive cash flows which are triggered by the cloud model is a perfect fit for a small and medium businesses that always have priority of investing available cash flows in core business.
• Low Risk of Capital: The risk of capital in a traditional model is huge since you are investing large amounts of money into a system and if it does not fit your business, the entire investment goes bad. In the cloud model you can choose your vendor wisely but still with a minimal ( almost zero) risk to your capital. What you lose if you do not like the system or want to change is maximum a month's rental. 
• System Upgrades & Change Mangement: Change is one of the core components of any organization. The systems they use have to be agile and flexible to change. the change can be in processes,technology or also in location. The cloud model is agnostic to such changes and works the same in such an agile environment. 
• USE CASE:A typical use case we came across was when one of our customers in a city had a power outage for 8 hours and their entire business was at risk. But since they were on our cloud based contact center, the calls were still routed to their executives at different   locations, on whatever available phones leading to zero downtime and business impact even in such a dire situation.
• Scale as you like and Pay as you scale: Unlike the traditional model of spending a fortune to enable extra capacity ( which is required only for a temporary period) The cloud based contact center provides you the freedom to Scale as per your requirement and pay us only when you scale.
• Instant Activation: No brick and mortar call center can be activated in a day where as on the cloud we will activate a call center for you on a hosted model in 30 minutes flat.  

So the way we see it, shifting to a cloud based contact center is not just a need but also a must for every business to improve their ROI, NRR and also to keep the constant focus on their core business, instead of spending resources and money in managing the contact center infrastructure.