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24-Hour Worldwide Call Center Set Up Using Only One Phone Number

Summary: Using Virtual PBX® ACD Queues Employees Can Man a Call Center from Any Point on the Globe and Be Reachable With a Single Telephone Number.

Description of the Virtual PBX®

When a company subscribes to the Virtual PBX® service, they receive an 800/888/877 number which is connected to a group of virtual extensions. Each extension can store up to four contact phone numbers which the Virtual PBX® tries in turn until the person is reached. When a customer dials the Virtual PBX® number he normally reaches the company's Auto-Attendant and has the choice of dialing an extension directly, using the company directory to spell the name of the desired employee, pressing a menu item for Sales, Customer or Tech Support, etc., or 0 for the operator. When this is done he is connected to the appropriate contact phone number of the employee selected by the above choices.

The Sales, Tech Support, Customer Support, etc. queues are known as ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) queues. The Virtual PBX® can be set up so that a customer calling an 800/888/877 number can reach a specified ACD queue directly without passing through the Auto-Attendant; and since the Virtual PBX® supports up to 8 ACD queues, it is easy to set up International Call Centers using them.

Setting Up the Call Center

Assume that a company wishes to establish an in-bound Call Center (Sales, Tech Support, Customer Support, etc.) which is reachable from anywhere in the world and which is open 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.

To do this:

• Set up virtual extensions for every employee who will be manning the call center. If the employees already work in an office with an phone system and have an existing extension, the easiest way to assign extensions on the Virtual PBX® is to use the same extension number as their existing extension.
• Define an ACD queue for each Call Center desired, Sales, Tech Support, etc.
• There are three ways to get to a given ACD queue:
  1. It can be a menu item on the Virtual PBX® Auto-Attendant
  2. it can be connected directly to an 800/888/877 number so that whenever that number is dialed the caller enters the ACD queue without passing through the Auto-Attendant
  3. VirtualDID (Direct Inward Dialing) can directly route calls from an arbitrary set of phone numbers which have forwarded to the Virtual PBX® number and which have been defined as routing to the desired ACD queue.
     Select one of these methods for the desired Call Center.
• Have each Call-Center employee store their contact phone numbers in the Virtual PBX® extension as required.
• For example:
  1. If the employee is working at his office, he would store his office number in Contact Phone No. 1, his cell phone number in Contact Phone No. 2, and his home phone (if desired) in Contact Phone No. 3.
  
  
  2. If the employee is temporarily working in a different country, he would store his international work number in Contact Phone No. 1, his rented cell-phone number in Contact Phone No. 2, and his temporary home phone number (if desired) in Contact Phone No. 3.
  3. If the employee is traveling on business he would store his rented cell-phone number in Contact Phone No. 1, his international hotel and room number in Contact Phone No. 2, and the phone number of the person that he is visiting in Contact Phone No. 3. The hotel number will ring him directly in his room if the hotel has either Direct Inward Dial to his room or Dial Through an Auto-Attendant with the room number as an extension.

Once the this is set up, each employee calls in to the Virtual PBX® and logs into the ACD queue which he is supposed to man for that day. When calls come in to the queue, they are routed to the personnel on a round robin basis. If all logged-in extensions are busy, the caller is put on hold for a limited time awaiting the next free extension. If this time becomes too long, the caller is sent to the ACD queue's voice mail, or the caller has the option of transferring to voice mail at any time by pressing *.

With this system there is no switching of Call Centers from one location to another as the work day begins and ends around the world. Employees simply come and go from the queue according to their scheduled working hours. The Call-Center employees can be anywhere, at the office, at home, in a vehicle with a cell phone, in a hotel room, etc.

As an example suppose a group of employees is located in Europe, in the U.S., and in Asia. The European employees log into the queue when their day begins. When their day ends, they log out. In the meantime, however, the U.S. employees have begun to log into the queue and take calls. As the U.S. days ends, the employees in Asia begin to log in; and when they go home, the European employees are beginning a new day.

From the customer's point of view, he simply calls the advertised phone number for the support or sales queue, and is connected to a representative no matter where the customer or the representative are in the world.

See also the Virtual PBX® tutorial Traveling Internationally and Receiving Calls and the Virtual PBX® usage scenario International Offices World Wide Connected by a Single Business Telephone Number. The web page Virtual Call Centers also gives additional information.

When a new Virtual PBX® is set up, VirtualPBX.com does the initial set up and is ready to provide tech support to be sure that the new call center is working seamlessly and that everyone understands how to use it.