In the age of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other social networking tools, it has become increasingly important to provide the best customer service available. Businesses are seeking ways to streamline customer support and reduce costs. Indian companies are in this context quickly adapting to ‘Crowd sourcing’ of contact centers, thus enabling them reduce response time to customers. The trend of businesses employing more home based employees, using different methods of social networking to generate higher revenues are increasing in India today, more than ever before.

Contact centers are faced with increasing pressure to upgrade their technology — both hardware and software to equip themselves for crowd sourcing. Business heads and CTOs need to realize that their contact center technology infrastructure must be nimble enough to respond to future trends and one of the biggest emerging weapons enabling crowd sourcing of call centers in India is customized ‘Cloud Telephony’ solutions.

A hosted telephony network provide businesses the ability to operate with multiple telephone numbers and forward them to as many multiple locations as they wish or to a single telephone line. So, a single line operated from anywhere, looks like it has local sales presence across regions of the country whether it is Mumbai, Delhi or Bangalore as well as a national toll free for easy rental. It will also help businesses set up rural BPOs in smaller Tier II & III cities and towns; an important requirement to make domestic call centers a viable business opportunity. Companies have been unable to scale their domestic call centers due to lack of good broadband and internet services in smaller towns. Cloud Telephony is almost a necessity to develop India’s potential domestic call center market.

Ozonetel’s ‘Cloud Agent’ solution brings the advantages of the distributed contact center to help businesses achieve more results out of less. Cloud Agent is an innovative approach towards providing professional UCI (unified customer interaction) services built on a Telco’s PSTN/wireless Cloud. It offers required inbound, outbound and blended services including Skills based routing of the calls, Computer Telephony Integration with screen POP, IVR, Call Recording, Quality Monitoring, Call and Agent Reporting- both real time and historic, SMS, email, all on a hosted basis. It can be deployed as an anytime anywhere agent for your call center requirements, whether it is inbound or outbound. Cloud Agent is a Plug & Play solution with carrier grade voice quality thus overcoming the limitations associated with VOIP based Call center solutions. The Platform enables crowd sourcing wherein pre-qualified agents receive and process calls in the cloud resulting in significant cost savings by paying only on transaction basis as opposed to agent wise which is the norm.

A cloud telephony platform such as this also makes it possible for businesses to mobilize their contact centers and call agents and makes it possible for mobile workers to be maximally efficient, reachable and effective in their jobs. The contact center is no longer constrained to a single geographic site, with agents being able to work at multiple sites or even from home. Companies will be able to track down and engage the specialist that can best meet their customer’s requirements, drawing on a geographically distributed pool of specialists.

Cloud Agent gives you plug & play solution that will help you eliminate inefficiencies and make your company more productive. Imagine that you don’t have to implement unnecessary hardware, software, and you also don’t need the manpower to monitor them while you still have a customer service that exceeds the required service levels. Cloud Agents makes this a reality by providing an expendable and flexible pay-as-you-go cloud based call-center operation service that will result in significant cost savings. Cloud Agent is a one stop shop so you do not need to make a large upfront investment on call-center resources; the space needed to house them; the hardware, software, and electricity needed to run the computing resources; and the cost of maintaining staff for administering the system, network, and database.

Why is this a big deal?
Even the most basic regional number capability was previously limited to actual number rental and call forwarding from virtual office businesses at many times the price of the network telephony services. With a hosted telephony platform such as ‘Cloud Agent’, there is no limit to the number of call management and routing options. The sky, your creativity and your business needs are the limit.

The Cloud Agent solution is a state of the art implementation of the 21st century’s call centre, based on the cloud computing model, that enables companies reduce capital expenditure (or outsourcing cost) by eliminating physical brick and mortar workplaces from the customer contact process, tap into a nearly unlimited talent pool by eliminating the geographical restrictions on agent recruitment and introduce efficiencies unmatched by its competitors.

The Author is the Founder & CEO, Ozonetel Systems