It goes without saying that each Call Center is different. Some are highly specialist boutiques in-house, serving the public or the organization itself. Others are large and dedicated to their trade, providing flexible campaigns to a wide variety of customers and many in low budget startup phases.
Here are some guiding questions that we at Bicom Systems have passed on to partners from time to time that have helped with prospecting.
PROSPECTIVE CALL CENTERS CHEAT SHEET
- How many Agents are there ?
- How many supervisors are there ?
- Is this an inbound or outbound call center pbx ?
- Is a dialler needed ? (if so : how is the data being sourced ? this could be from a .csv, or live feed from a web site)
- Are dispositions needing to be entered ? this could be for either inbound such as ‘which product was bought’ or outbound such as ‘could you call back next Thursday?’ for which record and consequences are needed.
- Is call recording needed on an ‘all on’ basis or occasional? (depending upon the answer there is a vast difference of resource required in the capacity of the servers)
- Do you require redundancy ?
- How will you interface for trunks ? PSTN or SIP ?
- Will you use handsets or headsets ?
- What are the current platform’s positives and negatives ?
- Are there any special requirements ?
- Are there any like to have features ?
Depending upon the answers above the cost and scale of the deployment may vary considerably.
Typically a two quad core with 16Gb RAM can support about 60-70 agents on full call recording with supervisors running reports constantly. For larger deployments there is the need to separate services. It is possible to put a server in front of the queue registrations to perform the call recordings. Another may be used for the processing of the call reports. This way the core queues are able to support closer to 400 registrations.
As always – should be most interested in your own experiences …
See also: Crib Sheet: Multi-Tenant & TELCOware