Exactly what is a Virtual Call Center?

Well … no … it’s not what you get when you hook up the Matrix to a predictive dialer.Virtual call centers are largely in-bound in function. They’re a means to assemble a team of knowledge workers across real world boundaries–whether that’s across the corporate campus, the country, or the whole blooming world. A 24/7 virtual call center can uses time-zones to spread the day (and the work) around the globe.

Intel defines a virtual call center as:

geographically separated groups of agents or customer service reps who, through the use of the Internet and technology, are considered a single entity for the purposes of call handling, reporting, management, and/or scheduling.

Want more? Cisco explains the virtual call center as:

an approach to enterprise-wide call center management that treats several geographically dispersed call centers as if they were a single call center. The virtual call center expands skills-based routing from the ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) to the network level.

Ah, but what’s an automatic call distributor, you ask? Cisco says:

A programmable device at a call center that routes incoming calls to targets within that call center. After the ICM software determines the target for a call, the call is sent to the ACD associated with that target. The ACD must then complete the routing as determined by ICM (Intelligent Contact Management) software.

[tags]virtual call center[/tags]