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Outbound Call Center Helps Generate Significant Revenue

The outbound call center is one of the most comprehensive telemarketing services which help in generating nearly double the revenue for their clients. The most important thing is that the returns on investment are shown in very small time period.

A call center can take-up inbound and outbound calls center services to give absolute success in businesses. Outbound call center services are cost effective. This is the reason that they are able to deliver better profits to the Company. The call center services are able to shoulder all responsibilities on behalf of the respective firm. Outbound call center satisfy the customers, keep them happy and generate a new line of customers who have a liking for specific product or services.

Drawbacks of own outbound call center:

1) Setting-up an own infrastructure will involve huge cost which is neither feasible nor practical. A huge chunk of amount is required to build-up a new unit with all latest facilities for outbound activities. Regular maintenance and repair is also involved in cost. This is an infeasible proposition to set up an own business-base.

2) Outbound call centers need expertise to run these centers. If the management of the Company can’t handle the staff, then they will not produce results. This will result in huge losses on investment and productivity.

3) A business unit should have adequate space to start an all-new system.

Outsourcing the outbound activities will save a business-unit from all possible drawbacks and result in substantial profits in long-run. The business-unit looks after the profit-margins and then takes a necessary step to get into that business. This gets them working in the long-run.

Most offshore Companies are outsourcing the activities from the outbound call center India due to low cost quality services within the stipulated time period.

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Feldman Law Center ? Foreclosures Overwhelming California Homeowners

Feldman Law Center – News by Feldman Law Center — Unfortunately, California homeowners are being overwhelmed by foreclosures, and many people feel there is no end in sight to the situation.  Legislation from California and the federal government has helped some people, but it is not enough.  Loan modification attorneys are working with people everyday who either do not have access to the right information, or who feel left to deal with lenders all by themselves.  While the legislation can be helpful, President Obama and the California legislature are not there to help make phone calls and negotiate loan modifications.

Foreclosure sales in California rose about 32 percent in the month of May of 2009, and 35 percent in April of 2009.  Just the California foreclosures from the month of May represent more than billion in total loan value.  That means billion worth of homes were foreclosed upon.  However, the good news is that lenders continue to voluntarily postpone the majority of foreclosure sales.    Lenders, such as banks and mortgage companies, are doing everything possible to delay foreclosures, and that includes working with California loan modification attorneys and homeowners on loan modifications.

In fact, of the foreclosures scheduled, lenders postponed 40 percent at their own request and another 33 percent at the mutual request of the lender and the borrower.  This means that lenders are absolutely willing to renegotiate the terms of mortgages, and homeowners who are in danger of (or are in the midst of) foreclosure proceedings still have hope.  Foreclosures often seem like the end of the world, and even with the new legislation, they can be overwhelming.  However, as evidenced by these statistics, lenders are not interested in taking over your home.  The Feldman Law Center has seen lenders take unique steps to negotiate with borrowers and homeowners in an attempt to keep the homeowner in their home, making affordable payments.

Things are particularly tough for homeowners in southern California.  Researchers from Columbia Business School said that over 30 percent of borrowers in San Diego and San Bernardino counties owe more than the refinancing limit with Sallie Mae and Freddie Mac.  In Los Angeles county, there are 29 percent of borrowers who do not qualify for refinancing because of the less-than-5-percent restriction from those two major mortgage lenders.

However, loan modification attorneys can help homeowners and borrowers overcome these restrictions.  Foreclosures seem to run up on people quicker than they think, in part because they are focusing on their immediate crisis (such as paying a car loan) and not the looming one of foreclosure.  However, it is never too late to contact a California loan modification attorney to help you keep your home and avoid foreclosure.  A qualified California loan modification attorney will know the laws, know the lenders, know the mortgage companies and be able to offer quality advice on a variety of subjects.  Trying to fight a foreclosure without a qualified loan modification attorney is a bad idea.

Visit us at www.feldmanlawcenter.com or call 800-588-0425.

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Feldman Law Center – Bob the Homeowner versus Net Present Value

Feldman Law Center – News by Feldman Law Center — A little known aspect of the Obama Administration’s “Making Home Affordable” plan is the “Net Present Value” test which essentially determines whether a loan modification or a foreclosure and sale will provide a better return for the investors behind the mortgage in question. The calculation takes the proposed monthly payment in a home loan modification and multiplies it over the life of the loan (payment x 12 months x 30 years). If that total comes in above what a sale and foreclosure would yield, the calculation would favor a modification. If it falls short, the calculation would lean toward foreclosure and sale.

Foreclosures in many scenarios will favor the investors while a modification often works to the advantage of the servicer. For the investor, a foreclosure and subsequent sale may result in a loss of principle but money coming back to the investor can be re-invested in other vehicles which can provide yield and returns. The disadvantage for the servicers is that, without monthly payments from the property, they lose the fees they were able to charge the investor for handling the payments, billing, and communication with the homeowner. A loan modification, on the other hand, benefits the servicer by keeping the payment stream, and the fees they can charge on it, alive. The modification hurts the investor by forcing a mark to market valuation which reflects the loss on the mortgage (also known as a haircut) due to a lower interest rate and, if applicable, a reduction in principle.  

The third party in the game is the homeowner (Bob) applying for the loan modification. It’s likely that the homeowner has heard of “Making Home Affordable” and is very aware of the 2% interest rates that were part of the headlines generated by the plan. Naturally, that’s the rate he wants. Unfortunately, getting Bob a 2% interest rate is not in the interest of either the investor or the servicer of his mortgage. For the investor, the lower the interest rate goes the bigger the haircut. Memorializing it in a modification will turn a theoretical haircut into an actual loss on the books. For the servicer, an interest rate at that low level can push the NPV score to a point where the test favors foreclosure over modification. If Bob’s property isn’t considered a lost cause it’s extremely unlikely that he’s going to see anything close to that 2% rate.

One of the other variables is Bob’s commission based income. His payments are going to be capped at 31% of his average monthly income, which has dropped considerably. In fact, it’s dropped so much that even by maxing his payment out at 31% of his monthly pay he falls below the estimated foreclosure and sale score. Conditions dictate foreclosure according to the net present value test.

The investor, seeing a score that clearly calls for foreclosure takes a look at sales statistics for Bob’s town and his neighborhood. Nothing is moving and foreclosure backlogs are growing. Average bids at auctions are coming in at less than 60% of the loan amount. Less than 2% of foreclosed houses are selling at auction. The estimate on what the property can realize in a foreclosure and sale is way too high for current conditions. If the house sells, and it’s a big if, it won’t be for anything near the price used in the NPV calculation. The investor decides to pull back on the foreclosure due to the regular hits he’s already taking in his portfolio and his aversion to putting another property into the portfolio. The pullback on the foreclosure doesn’t mean he’s going to allow for a modification, however. There’s a haircut waiting with the modification as well. This property is going to sit in limbo while things work themselves out.

There won’t be any communication regarding this stalemate between Bob, the servicer, or the lender. From Bob’s point of view the servicer’s people aren’t responsive and aren’t calling him back. The truth of the matter is that the servicer’s processors know as much about Bob’s situation as Bob does; not much. The sides settle in to the day to day of nothing happening which stretches to months.

The commentary from homeowners that have tried to modify their mortgages under the guidelines of Making Home Affordable runs along a thread very similar to that of our theoretical Bob. While much of the delay can be attributed to overload, staffing, and training issues at the lenders and servicers, the stalemate between servicers and their investors is bogging things down as well. The Safe Harbor Bill, passed by Congress in May, was aimed directly at this standoff. Its main objective was to remove the threat of lawsuits filed by investors when they felt that the servicers were acting on their own best interests in approving loan modifications.

While there may be a conflict of interest currently, neither side wants to go to war over this issue. Despite the increased autonomy given the servicers, it’s likely that they will still want to be on the same page with investors to preserve long standing relationships that have worked well over time. It therefore looks like limbo, status quo, and homeowners waiting for a knock on the door will rule the day and the near term.

Those homeowners seeking to avoid this quagmire would be best served to hire legal representation familiar with the process to either navigate the Making Home Affordable guidelines or to modify their mortgages independently from the government program. With over 600 successful home loan modifications negotiated on behalf of their clients, The Feldman Law Center is well suited to guide you through your loan modification. Call them today at (949) 544 8224

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Indian Call Center(Extreme Funny Clip)
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Identifying the right infrastructure for at home or remote agents whether it is premise based or hosted call center solution like 3clogic

Fredericton, NB — June 17, 2010

Indosoft has successfully deployed Redfone foneBridge2 with its call center software Q-Suite, enabling clustering of Asterisk servers for high availability redundancy. Redfone foneBridge2 is an integrated black-box T1/E1-to-Ethernet Gateway designed as an alternative to PCI boards for providing PRI interface. Indosoft call center software Q-Suite is a unique and feature rich ACD providing a powerful contact center technology platform for Asterisk telephony, geared towards medium and large call centers. Q-Suite ACD easily scales to multiple Asterisk servers and provides high availability as well as call recovery. Its ACD for Asterisk is available with socket and .NET interfaces allowing business verticals to integrate CTI (Computer Telephony Interface) into their applications.

“This deployment is surely a good indicator of Indosoft’s confidence in Redfone foneBridge2,” says Mark Warren, CEO of Redfone. “Asterisk running on commercial servers can experience single points of failure, putting voice traffic at risk. Redfone foneBridge2 is a second-generation external hardware appliance that provides redundancy by handling Linux clusters running Asterisk. We are delighted to add Indosoft Call center software Q-Suite to the list of contact center platforms that use Redfone products.”

“Our focus is on deploying a robust call center technology platform for medium and large call centers with emphasis on features, scalability and redundancy,” says Gabe Bourque, V. P. of Operations at Indosoft. “Asterisk has evolved to become the dominant vehicle for contact center and phone system migrations to IP telephony. This was an ideal opportunity at a large public university to deploy Redfone with our call center software. Q-Suite offers a robust, redundant call center ACD capable of scaling to multiple Asterisk servers. High availability ACD and the ability to preserve calls during any single point of failure are two distinct features essential for mission critical contact centers.”

Q-Suite with its versatile ACD provides all essential and advanced features required for setting up and migrating contact centers to Asterisk. A drag and drop graphical tool is available for the creation of Dialplans to build sophisticated IVR for effective call routing and call processing. Roaming and remote agent setup with Hot Desking, On-hook and Off-hook agents, Skills based Routing and Queue Prioritization allow complete control over the management of inbound services. Call monitoring, wall-board, queue announcements and detailed reporting are some of the other features available out of the box within Q-suite’s ACD.

About Indosoft Inc.

Indosoft Inc. is a global provider of call center software for Asterisk, Q-Suite. Since migrating its contact center solution to Asterisk in 2003, Indosoft has been evolving its call center technology platform, to offer a scalable, feature-rich, redundant ACD for Asterisk and VoIP.

About Redfone

Redfone Communications is a pioneer and leader in delivering hi-performance, hi-reliability T1/E1 and SIP connectivity solutions. Formed in 2003 and built by a team of veteran engineers specializing in the very demanding field of avionics data communications, Redfone’s unique engineering pedigree delivers extremely robust, reliable and unique hardware and software solutions to the telephony market.

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Outbound Call Centers and Direct Marketing Campaigns

Today’s call center is a channel of communication that strings caller and business together. An outbound call center is one in which call center agents make outbound calls to potential customers on behalf of a business or client with the intention of selling products or services to the individual. Calls made from the outbound center can include telemarketing, sales or fund-rising calls as well as calls for contact list updating, customer retention campaigns,  sending messages or reminders, surveys or verification services.

The use of outbound call center is undergoing enormous growth due to importance attached by companies to customer care, telemarketing for product offerings, growth of direct marketing etc. Telemarketing is growing and information lines are forming part of many product service offerings. The growth of direct marketing has also contributed to the popularity of outbound call centers as a means of reaching targeted customer bases.

Today, outbound calling is an important part of modern sales and marketing. It is critical for any lead generation campaign. No doubt telephone is the most effective communication means for targeting your prospects in no time. Telemarketing is one of the important features of outbound call centers. The staffs are trained in customer service and techniques to sell your product/services and professionally conduct your campaign.

Outbound telemarketing can be used by itself or with other methods of direct marketing such as direct mail follow-up or e-mail follow-up. It delivers your message directly to your prospect and allows for immediate interaction. No other medium can provide this instant marketing feedback. Telemarketing services is the calling area of a direct marketing campaign and can fit in with any call to action, up sell or cross sell. It can allow companies to not only learn more about and from their customer base, but it can also provide direct access into their customer’s lives and homes.

With ever-rising competition, it has become all the more important to reach out to your customers.  Direct marketing campaigns plays a critical role in the success of a company and the launch of a new product or service. Most companies rely on some form of direct marketing to acquire new customers and generate additional revenue from existing customers.

 The challenges faced by marketing departments of outbound call centers are not significantly different from that of past. As always, the main goals are to convert more prospects into customers and retain and increase revenues from existing customers. But what has changed really is the complexity of the marketing landscape. Due to the rise of personalization and segmentation, customers expect to receive highly targeted communications. The number of channels through which to reach customers has expanded which includes e-mail and the Web. That’s why today’s customer often use more than one channel to find information and purchase products and services.

The four basic elements of outbound campaign includes-

Make a list or database of customers or prospects you plan to communicate via telephone, e-mail, the internet etc. This database is the least expensive and most important element of your direct marketing campaign.

The message or information, which you are going to provide to your prospects play a major part in your program’s success or failure. It should be well-written keeping your customers in view.

Dialogue used to communicate your message and persuade the target to respond favorably or cooperate plays a very important role.

There is no substitute for experience. A good service representative knows how to handle objections, probe for need and close the deal.

 Outbound call centers are the proven tools in preserving and growing sales as well as providing as essential pipeline of market intelligence.

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www.inso.us InSO provides world class inbound & outbound call center outsourcing services, offshore BPO & technical support, international telephone order taking & business answering services.
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Inbound Call Center Services, Call Center Outsourcing, Order Taking, Answering Services and many more Call Center Services available from UCG.

Contact Center Industry Terms as Defined by an Oracle Certified Partner

If you are a newcomer to the contact center industry, you may have heard of Promero and the key product they are marketing called the Oracle Contact Center Anywhere call center solution. But as a newcomer to this fusion of IT and call center functions, you need to know a little bit more about the terms industry mainstays seem to take for granted because they use them daily.

When an agent is busy with so many calls from customers (called inbound or incoming calls), this may leave some customers frustrated because they cannot reach the agent fast enough to suit their needs. This results in the so-called Abandoned Call or Lost Call (meaning simply the customer opted to hang up than wait around.)

The agent is also referred to by other names, like specialist, attendant, staff member, customer service professional, team member, account executive, technician, operator, engineer, consultant, associate, rep, telephone sales representative, service representative, and customer service representative. They all refer to the contact center agent or call center agent who is responsible either for accepting incoming calls; or for making outgoing or telemarketing calls (also dubbed the Outbound calls.)

The worst thing that can happen to a call center is if it has an All Trunks Busy situation, wherein every one of the trunks in their system or network is clogged with calls. This means that inevitably some callers will encounter busy signals when they try to make incoming calls to the call center. And when callers encounter busy signals consistently, the frequency of Abandoned Calls or Lost Calls will go up as well since customers will not hang around to wait for the trunk or the line to clear so their call will be patched through.

This is where Average Time to Abandonment comes in – this term refers to how long on average your caller will stay waiting in queue before choosing to abandon the call altogether. In an ideal call center solution, Average Time to Abandonment will be rather high which means that the caller will agree to wait a longer period of time until an agent picks up the call to address the concern. But in reality, many call centers experience short Average Time to Abandonment, meaning clients will call, wait a short time then hang up. A short Average Time to Abandonment will mean more Lost Calls representing Los Business.

Any of the call center software packages you might choose from will all have a specific Architecture. Architecture simply means the basic design or way by which the software was created so that its different components can work together in cohesion. A good call center solution architecture would be one that can factor in the aspects of system capacity, the ability to upgrade the system, and capacity for integration with other systems as well.

One virtual call center solution you may want to try out for your call center system is the Oracle Contact Center Anywhere call center solution.

St. George, UT — September 1, 2010

TCN, Inc. today released next-generation call center technology: the TCN SoftPhone. Now TCN clients can utilize on demand TCN’s full Virtual Call Center suite of products to contact customers – without having to purchase a single phone or to engage a telco provider.

Client call center agents need only plug headsets into their work station computers and TCN’s SoftPhone functions as the entire telephone system through which agents can take inbound calls and place outbound calls via TCN’s Predictive Dialer or Interactive Voice Messaging components.

TCN’s SoftPhone features advanced reporting tools that provide managers with per-agent reporting in real time. Managers can place their mouse over the top of each agent’s icon to see that agent’s status and how long she has been in that status. Managers can also see how many hold calls are in queue, as well as immediate statistics for waiting, talking, and wrap-up time averages.

Managers can select to view all of this information based upon customized virtual hunt groups.

Additionally, agents can quickly add phone numbers to the Do Not Call List, and even have the option of placing an expiration date for these new additions to the List. The agent SoftPhone interface presents agents with all the traditional telephone functionalities, like a mute button and speaker and microphone volumes.

“Now, a call center needs only workstation PCs and a T-1 and their agents can be up and running using the latest call-center technology in literally minutes. Capital expenditures are a thing of the past; ease-of-use and on-demand customization are truly here,” explained TCN CEO Terrel Bird.

TCN offers free testing of its Virtual Call Center technology, including these latest innovations, to all takers. Call 888.235.3149, email sales@tcnbroadcasting.com, or visit www.tcnp3.com.

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