Working with Remote Agents

Businesses with remote users, or multi-site contact centers can dramatically reduce costs and improve responsiveness to marketplace needs using FrontRange Voice. Today's business realities drive a new multi-site contact center model that is flat, consolidated, and global in nature.

For most of the 20th century, call centers were designed as large monolithic beasts that could ensure that agents would be available to answer questions. This approach flies in the face of today's agile businesses who have multiple locations, each with unique specialties, and a growing pool of telecommuting employees. To take this approach today means deploying multiple redundant call centers, which means added expense and overhead.

FrontRange Voice breaks this mold by using VoIP technology to allow a single IPCM server to distribute calls to the right person at the right time, regardless of their physical location. They only need an internet connection to receive calls from the server. This approach allows resource pooling and enables businesses to have many participants in a call center, even if they are not full time call center agents.

Because agents can be anywhere, businesses can more easily adopt extended support hours without having to have agents work the night shift. They simply employ agents who work in the same timezone as the customers who would be calling in. Be it across the US, or extended internationally, now 'follow the sun' phone support is as easy as sending an email.

Underlying Technology

The key to supporting remote users so easily is to replace the existing proprietary network usually employed by legacy PBX systems with Voice over IP. This approach uses the internet as the connection between the agents phone, and the central voice server. Voice over IP has become increasingly popular for residential users from services such as Vonage, and is a well established way of making phone calls. In addition, FrontRange Voice supports sophisticated voice compression technology to enable high quality conversations over the public internet, using a standard broadband connection such as cable or DSL.

Portability is an issue with telecommuters, they may be in the office one day, and at a home office the next. It is impractical to carry your telephone with you, so FrontRange addresses this need with a built in soft-phone which runs on the users PC. This means that a user can bring their laptop, and a USB headset with them to their home office, hotel, or even a local hotspot, and log in to your phone system using only their PC.

Safety is key when enabling remote users. As such, FrontRange has a stringent set of authentication requirements built into our solution so only your agents can access your system. You have total control over which agents get in, and what capabilities they have when they are logged in.