Introducing the Web Call Center
Then the call center at IDT Corp. gets swamped, the Hackensack, NJ telecom company turns to Communications Service Center, a Margate, FL service bureau with a neat twist.
CSC’s phone reps work from Web pages. A client’s 800 number triggers its Web site to download so the phone rep can read the script from it and enter order information onto the Web page.
IDT, with 1997 sales of $135 million, sells Internet access, long-distance service and prepaid Internet-based calling cards. It does business in 180 countries.
Gail Nitti, IDT’s director of sales, says she especially likes the CSC system’s security factor. “None of [CSC’s] reps ever see how our orders are processed,” she says. The system works particularly well for IDT because many of its products, such as its phone cards, must be activated instantly. IDT gets the orders right away and can also make quick changes in the scripts over the Web.
“The problem with outsourced call centers is when we start taking records internally, we have to pass them on externally,” says Stephen Shooster, CSC president and chief information officer. “If I take the records on a Web site, they’re there automatically. Using the Internet, you get a very inexpensive wide-area network.”
Shooster invented the “Web Call Center” and has a patent pending on it. He admits that the one hitch is when pages download slowly. He’s dealt with that by having an answer phrase pop up on the screen that is generated locally, not from the Internet, which the rep can use while the page is downloading.
CSC is a 24-year-old inbound and outbound call center with clients such as Time Warner, AT&T Wireless, the Florida Marlins baseball club and Bausch & Lomb.
