Moving way ahead of the times

As we are trying to get to grips with the intricacies of the physical call centre, the virtual call centre is knocking on the door. There has been a great transition in the field of customer service with the initiation of call centres and similarly the problems have also multiplied. In fact if you speak of call centers today, the reaction of the public will be largely unsympathetic. It is an embodiment of appalling and lack of ability of the customer service division. The personal interaction is something which has been quite precious for so long for business and this system has been the forbearer to the very customer care business.

Let us see what will happen when there is a switch to the virtual call centre. There is a disconsolate guess that things may actually become more complicated with the reduction of human interaction. There are schools of thought which believe that all the problems of the modern call center arise from the fact that it does not encourage face to face contact. There is a great amount of understanding that prevails in two people speaking to each other. You will not be able to interpret the feelings of the opposite person while on a phone.

Assessing the future of the virtual call centre

The answer that this school of thought advocates is as radical as it is impossible to implement. It is not possible to reverse to the phone contact on the basis of the need to human touch. A customer service officer to provide solutions to you at any point of time may be the most desired decision. The factual situation is that it is beyond the capacity of any business venture to bear such huge expenses. No customer will be willing to shell out huge money to go back to the earlier systems. Some may even remark very rudely that those times were the archetypes of incapability.

For the people who have never believed in the call centre phenomenon anyway, the transition to the virtual call center will be a retrograde step. They feel that this way again they will drop so many customers. The voice recognition will be severely limited since it will all become computerized. Regardless of the toil taken by the experts computers are still left with certain amount of snag. Moving on to the virtual call centre might mean cutting the final umbilical cord between the customer and their company.

Many companies are of the opinion that it is better to spend on this system than to rely on the employees ineptitude and thereby lose so much in revenue. In a virtual call centre there is no need for you to have a brigade of employees and you can have a control on the costs as well. There can be a lot of reservations about the efficacy of the functioning of the structure in dealing promptly with the snags in the transactions. I feel that this system is too good to be true.

Adam Smith is an in-house writer for PBX Plus, the provider of Free PBX and Virtual Call Center. He is a habitual reader and giver of articles related to the telephony industry.