Key Data points to consider while setting up a call center in India

This article is intended for all those business users who are intending to set up a Contact Center and want to make objective decisions based on data. The data presented here is based on our experience of serving 150+ customers on our Cloud based Virtual Contact Center in India - http://cloudagent.in 

If you are looking at factors to consider on whether you need a Call Center at all in the first place, you can read our blog - http://blog.cloudagent.in/2013/02/does-your-business-need-contact-center.html

By the time you finish reading this article, you should be able to calculate and decide on the number of agents required or number of PRI lines required or number of calls you can handle using a certain number of agents etc.

Based on our observation we have given averages across verticals ( We are lucky to be serving customers across 20+ verticals, for case studies - http://ozonetel.com/casestudies.php). The key parameters that have been considered are efficiency of handling calls (% answered calls), Pickup times, Total handling time per day of an agent , wrapup times etc.

For an Inbound Contact Center, our observations are as given below: 

Wrap up Time is the time agent spends after the call on writing additional information etc about the call.

Call Handling time is Agents Talk Time + Wrap Up Time .

The conclusions you can draw based on this data is that a business requires its agents to work on its process as well along with taking the calls - hence agent utilization will not be more than 30-40% max. for an inbound contact center. So handling customer calls is only part of the contact center executives job. It is very important that you know what percentage of your agents time will go attending calls and what % is required to work in the process updating customer data - be it orders, deliveries or leads.

Based on this data, you should be able to estimate what are your call center needs. For example, if you need to receive 1500 calls with a success rate of 90% ( answer 90% of 1500 calls -1350), with an average duration of 3 minutes per call, agent utilization rates of 40% and total agent login time of 480 mins ( 8 hours) - You will need 21 agents approximately. With the same data but utilization of only 30%  - you will need 28 agents.  
To ensure that you can calculate your call center needs, we have given here a basic calculator which will tell you the number of agents required or number of calls you can handle for a given set of agents etc. You can access this calculator here - http://ozonetel.com/app/calculator.php

Please do note that this is a basic calculator and does not consider queue times  etc. If you are a real pro, then simply google for a Erlang calculator and use one of the numerous calculators given on the web. In our next article, we will definitely provide our version of an advanced calculator.

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'

The 360 degree support experience on the cloud

In this world of real time support expected by the customers, it is imperative that your support desk is enabled with the right tools. Given the various advantages of cloud which are being realized, it makes sense to move your support desk on to the cloud completely. To add one more feather in the cap, now cloud agent  can be integrated with Freshdesk as well. To know more, here's the link on how you can do that -  http://blog.kookoo.in/2012/09/mashing-up-freshdesk-with-kookoo-for.html . As you know, Cloud Agent is powered by KooKoo platform - http://kookoo.in and hence all that is given in the blog is possible with cloud agent as well.

When running a support system call center, we will need an IVR, a call center software and after call processing.
1. IVR: Cloudagent integrate well with KooKoo. Using KooKoo, you can build complex IVRs to provide proper treatment to your callers. The IVR can be deeply integrated with your systems to provide contextual information to caller.

2. Call Center: Cloudagent is the worlds first call center on the cloud. The state of the art agent toolbar, coupled with nifty features like screenpops, agent scripts etc allow the agent to handle the call with all the details of the caller presented to him.

3. After call processing: Once a call is finished, the disposition screen is presented and disposition reports are also available. There is also a well defined API support to push the call details into your CRM at the end of every call.

As you know, cloud agent is well integrated with various API's to any third party CRM systems and hence it is only a matter of choice now on how you want to integrate your voice support with the various options available for the CRM systems.To know more, you can contact us at sales@cloudagent.in or directly call us on 1800 200 0820.

Our First Post

 In this blog we will discuss  about our virtual cloud contact center
and how its helping various businesses - be it startups, e-commerce
websites, SME's or large players to quickly provide rich interaction
experience to their customer. Enabling agent sitting across multiple locations,
working as a single team, providing localized specific services with
regional flavour.

The focus of this blog will primarily be to talk about telecom in
general, Cloud Contact Centre technologies, best practices, and the new
innovative contact centre solutions that takes the customer experience
to new level.

Cloud agent is a new approach towards the next generation contact
centre solution, we will share with you how we are solving some key
challenges in the industry and explain new trends that  our product
has lead the way for …..


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