Feature Rich Solutions Deliver Competitive Advantage
A call center was competing to win a large contract from a US research and data collection firm for outbound calling campaigns to US and Latin America. Employing a bi-lingual staff, the call center already had a competitive advantage. However, to win the new contract, the call center also needed a predictive dialer and low outbound call rates to key destinations. An existing DOW Networks customer, the company again asked DOW Networks for help.
For three years, DOW Networks provided the call center with competitive call rates, hosted Asterisk PBX service and inter-Asterisk exchange (IAX) trunking from San Jose to DOW Networks’ facilities in Atlanta. DOW Networks worked with the customer during that period to increase the number of seats-in-service to more than 200, and then scale as needed to match changing business volumes. The customer was sold on both the advantages of hosted PBX over premises PBX, as well as the advantages of working with DOW Networks.
DOW Networks offers hosted services that range from PBXs to call center suites that meet the requirements of most inbound and outbound call centers - and at a price far below that of proprietary systems. This computer telephony integration (CTI) solution is based on open source Asterisk® IP PBX. Its features and functionality for outbound campaigns include:
- Call, agent and queue monitoring
- Call recording
- Broadcast messaging
- Predictive, progressive and preview dialing modes
- Answering machine detection
- Do not call (DNC) list management
- Real time statistics
- Historical reports and more
After discussing the prospective customer's requirements with call center management and demonstrating the hosted service, the customer agreed this was the right solution. They requested a trial and internal demonstration for their prospective customer. DOW responded with a 30-day trial of the software, including customer configuration, and on-site support. The result was a very successful customer demonstration.
Based on the economics of a hosted solution, the call center was able to propose a very competitive price to their customer. This, along with competitive rates from DOW Networks, helped them win the deal. To help ensure their success, DOW continued on-site support while the initial outbound campaigns were executed.
Today, 75 agents and their supervisors in Costa Rica log on each day via an IAX trunk to an application hosted at DOW Networks in Atlanta. The system uses predictive and preview dialing modes to place 230,000 calls per day to phone numbers in the US, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Argentina. The calls that are answered have an average duration of 30 minutes, during which time the agents conduct business and consumer interviews for their customer, a research and data collection company.
This hosted solution eliminated the significant upfront capital investment that the call center would be required to pay for a premises-based (hardware) call center PBX and predictive dialer. Per-seat pricing provides the call center with a predictable monthly operating expense and a way to quickly and cost-effectively add agents to support changing business volumes. As with all hosted call center solutions and other international VoIP services from DOW Networks, customers also receive quality call routing, high levels of reliability and security, and 24X7 technical support.
DOW Networks serves call centers in Africa, Caribbean, Europe, India, Latin America and Philippines with integrated computer-telephony solutions and international VoIP services.
