Call Center Forum

Abhishek Baid · Joined: 29 Oct 2004 Posts: 19

I have been in the field of Remote Technical Support for the past five years and it has been exciting to see the Luke worm response in the beginning from IT a non-IT companies accepting this as a profitable alternative.

But, as the irony of this has also been that in the same time frame lot of non-specialized companies and basic call centers with no or minimum understanding of the field tried to exploit the same and this has led to lots of customers being Avery of actually outsourcing their needs which otherwise is an excellent option. The sufferers are companies which actually have technical support as their "Core Competency". They have to face two main problems.

1. Pricing; as the non-specialized companies severely under quote. The reason for this being that they don’t understand the process involved or they just don’t invest on the value adds.

2. Sever stress on the capital investment as the companies with competency have to advance their investment to prove their competency (those investments which it could have avoided at least for another three-six months, e.g.: Real time reporting system and other value adds).

The above reasons also have set the sales cycle to a very unrealistic curve. This has direct impact with the survival of the center itself. As mentioned earlier the pure technical center’s investment is much more then the non core centre that means the pressure to revenue generation is more and that in turn would mean an aggressive approach which is hampered by non-core call centers.

I would like to hear from my fellow friends on what do you think is an ideal mechanism to deal with such a situation and how dose a "core competency centre" actually survive in the market and have realistic sales curve and turnarounds.