I doubt you'll find many people with positive things to say about call centers. And why should they? The poor things are misused and abused in all kinds of ways. But it's not the fault of the technology. Which, like all telephony gear, has long been overpriced and under-featured. Voice over IP has revolutionized call centers—just as it has practically everything else in the world. Can you build a call center on free software? Yes, you can. Call centers fall into two general categories: customer service, and annoying phone spammers. Customer service call centers typically handle tasks like:

* Taking orders

* Fixing problems

* Providing information and general assistance

Those are the functions that many businesses need—someone to answer the phone and be helpful. Perhaps these should be called answer centers instead of call centers. Then there are the call centers that are literally call centers—these are the folks that pester us as though we were paying for our phone service just so we could serve as extensions of their marketing. It's rather amusing browsing publications that target this type of call center.

They use benign phrases like "outbound dialing," "predictive dialing," "customer care," "marketing relationships," "interactive intelligence," and "text-to-speech systems for totally automated collections". Now that's progress—completely eliminating the humans. You can complete the cycle by setting up an Asterisk server at home to talk to the telemarketer's telephony server, and never have to touch a telephone yourself. Not all phone spammers are really spammers, of course.

Volunteer organizations benefit from using automated dialers to remind members of meeting dates and other events. Businesses that offer genuine opt-in for certain services might as well reap the benefits of automation as well. For example, my bank calls me when they have specials on things I'm interested in. That is a good thing. Not like some businesses that elevate a trivial one-time purchase into a lifelong intimate relationship. Read my lips: OPT-IN.

Click Here to Continue Reading