VirtualPBX™ provides call centers for businesses. No purchase of equipment is necessary; and the agents can be located anywhere, in the office, at home, in a vehicle, etc. Having the possibility of agents working from home can greatly reduce the costs of operating a call center.

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) is an extremely powerful productivity tool for organizations which receive a lot of incoming calls. Until now, most companies could never afford ACD since traditional PBX vendors require add-ons costing thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to support it. Even then, their ACD's are designed for full-time call centers where you have dozens or hundreds of people in a single building. And, even the more advanced ACD's do not usually transfer calls to agents offsite.

The VirtualPBX™ enables you to set up as many as eight separate virtual call centers in a single Virtual PBX® with agents distributed anywhere in the world.

Let's take the example of a marketing organization with sales people working out of their homes. Some people might be in California, some in North Carolina, some in Texas, some in Canada, and some in Europe. With the VirtualPBX™, all of these people can be put together into a single workgroup, and receive calls through a single company toll-free 800/888/877 number.

Here are a couple of examples of how ACD behaves in this situation.

In this scenario, you receive occasional incoming calls, and want to make sure these calls are evenly distributed to your sales force. When your VirtualPBX™ receives a call for an ACD workgroup, it sends the call to the person who has been idle for the longest period of time. This approach insures that incoming calls are distributed evenly to your salespeople. Most phone systems send calls to one person (i.e., a sales receptionist) who must then manually send the call to someone else.

In this scenario, all of your sales people are already on the phone talking to somebody. When a call comes in, the VirtualPBX™ puts the call on hold and plays music or a message while the caller waits for the next available agent. From the caller's perspective, this sounds as professional as any Fortune 500 company, even if your company consists of four people working out of their homes in entirely different parts of the country. This is a very powerful tool, saves time, and projects a professional image to your customers and prospective customers.

In this scenario, your company already has a major call center. The problem is determining how to staff it. Do you staff for peak call volume? Do you staff for average call volume? Staffing for peak call volume can be very expensive, because your agents are getting paid even when there are no calls coming in. Staffing for the average call volume causes some of your customers to hang up in disgust because they have to wait too long. Instead, you staff for the average call volume to make best use of your full-time agents and keep your costs down, and you use your VirtualPBX™ to provide overflow call handling using your part-time agents that work from home and are paid according to how long they are on the phone. You save money on staffing and keep your customers happy.