Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Calling the Contact Centre - Is Anybody Home?

By Steve Alexander


You can be forgiven for thinking of a room full of workers sporting headsets and fielding calls when you envisage a contact centre. Nowadays though, the person on the other end of the phone may not be in an office, or even on company premises, when you make a call to a contact centre.

The introduction of flexible working and telecommuting has completely changed the way the world works and even in the most unexpected roles, there are options for home working. So whether you're seeking help and advice, looking to make a purchase or make a payment, don't just assume that the person you're speaking to is in a contact centre.

A wealth of opportunities for workers has been created by unified communications. Today, unified communications mean that provided you have access to the right tools and software, you can access your system and log in to work from anywhere. The days of needing to be at your own desk with your own handset to make a call from your own line seem like a distant memory. There are numerous ways of working from home whether it's logging into a phone at home using your extension number or even using your smart phone.

Unified communications mean that the age old concept of Monday to Friday in the office is dead, with many people opting to work from home on and off during the week. Whether it is for childcare reasons, to save time on the commute, health reasons or simply down to personal preference, many members of today's workforce want the opportunity to work from home, so ensuring that you have the right unified communications in place to cater to this trend is becoming increasingly crucial.

You don't necessarily need the same hardware that your office business telephone systems use when working from home. If you are making outbound calls, why not go off the reservation and use an online system such as Skype to make calls rather than business telephone systems? The growth in VoIP telephony means you could simply divert calls through to your own landline or mobile phone. With cloud computing, VoIP telephony and all of the other softwares that exist today, working from home is becoming the norm, as the technology being used by business telephone systems today is ever advancing.




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