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The call center industry is experiencing rapid growth which in turn is driven by rapid changes in technology, social media, and consumer behavior. Today, superior customer service is synonymous with satisfied and loyal customers, and drives the profits for several global organizations.

Research suggests that consumers still prefer telephonic channels over email or chat when it comes to having their issues resolved, with more than 30% of the customers making at least 2 calls a month to correspond with a customer care executive. Almost 60% of the people in fact are willing to change their services only to receive better customer service!

In light of such evidence, more companies are gravitating towards virtual call centers and the many benefits associated with partnering with one. The advantages of virtual call centers are many, and most service providers offer a robust feature set, simplistic and intuitive web interface, and even support detailed reporting features which benefit their clients.

8 Virtual Call Center Benefits
A virtual call center basically functions with the help of the internet, which is its main infrastructure. Since it can be run from any place in the world, outsourcing virtual call centers help organizations save costs and reap other associated rewards. In this article, we will take you through some of the most important benefits of virtual call center services.

Technological Preparedness
Since a virtual call center always allows remote contact center agents to work in real-time with your employees or users, your infrastructure has to be built up from the ground up to support internet telephony and real-time video calls. This increase in infrastructural preparedness allows you to be ready for other future challenges, and allows you to scale up operations as you expand easily

Easy Designing, Deployment, Training, & Support
With the help of increased flexibility you can spend less time managing the call center and more time focusing on other business critical operations. By partnering with a proven virtual call center service provider, you gain immediate access to project managers and network architects who can help design, deploy, train and support your existing staff for better process efficiencies.

Good ROI
It is a well-known fact that virtual call centers allow you to receive excellent ROI by heightening your employee productivity and increasing your customer satisfaction levels. This in turn has an immediate effect on overall business operations. Since virtual call center agents can seamlessly switch between inbound and outbound calls, there is no necessity to have two separate teams handling both, thereby saving you money as well.

Geographically Adept
One of the most significant advantages of virtual call center is that because of the nature of the way their infrastructure is set up, call center agents do not have to concentrate on any single geographic location. As a result, they are able to function more independently as compared to other regular smaller call centers. This is a boon for organizations that have operations all across the globe and customer satisfaction is a major factor which they need to address.

Scalability and Adaptability
One of the virtues of working with a virtual call center service provider is that you never have to worry about seasonal expectations and dwindling business arms which might not require the same level of support that the more successful ones might need. Whether you require 20 agents or 200, virtual call centers can easily ramp up operations as per your requirement.

Better Virtual Agent Efficiency
High-quality call center agents can work remotely from home as well as an office location, and since the job entails freedom and peace of mind, the agents are not only relaxed and happy to work, but turn in better efficiency rates as compared to standard call center agents. Companies can also efficiently stagger agents based out of different time zones to respond to variations in call volume, without having to set up managers who would help coordinate multiple call centers around the world. This also boosts employee productivity and efficiency.

Improved Customer Satisfaction
Customers always prefer agents who are friendly, knowledgeable, and answer their questions in a direct, timely manner. First call resolution is as important to customers as to you, and virtual call centers ensure that the best agents are assigned to answer given questions whenever required. Virtual call centers allow you to depend on chosen call center agents who have the relevant work experience and the mindset to handle tough customers, and benefit from better custom satisfaction rates.

Emergency Preparedness
Virtual call centers by nature depend on redundancy, which in turn helps them to be well prepared for any and all emergencies. Centralizing call center agents in a single location is a dangerous proposition as in case of a fire or any other natural calamity, there won't be any backup to take care of the customers. This issue can be altogether avoided with the help of virtual call center agents.

What's next for Virtual Call Centers?
Today, customers are more likely to seek out answer to their problems by going online and searching for the relevant solution before dialing a customer care center. When one begins to consider that as the days go by, a company's contact center increasingly becomes the only way customers stay in touch with them, the need for more effective virtual call center benefits become even more transparent. In the future we can expect to see the following changes to affect virtual call centers -

Relationship Hubs - Contact centers for customers will increasingly function as relationship hubs and will be responsible for more than just handling customer calls. By 2020, web chat would become the primary mode of communication between customers and virtual assistants, and social media channels will also see increased interaction between both
All Day Support - 24/7 customer service will become a mandatory features thanks to globalization and the connecting power of the internet. Organizations will move to virtual call centers en masse as they realize how effective they are when it comes to functioning 24/7
Speech Analytics - Virtual call centers will start leveraging speech pattern analytics so as to analyze a customer's emotional state and deliver the gleaned information in the form of system hints to the agent on call with the customer. This would help them provide better support, reduce churn rates, as well as gain the ability to upsell and cross-sell
Implementation of Cloud technology - Cloud technology would soon become pervasive in the world of virtual call centers, as information collected from social media, calls, web chats, etc. would be easy to funnel to a central location using cloud solutions such as VHT conversation bridges, etc. This in turn would foster better agent-customer interactions.