The trend of outsourcing inbound and outbound contact centers the past few years have become a billion dollar industry, the main issue here however are the growing acceptance by companies to move their outsourced contact center offshore. The large numbers of Filipino English speaking personnel, Indian technical expertise, and very low cost Chinese labor have proven to be a worthwhile management decision for a lot of industries.

There is no need to discuss the advantages of outsourcing contact centers when even the government itself has begun outsourcing a lot of their public service lines to outsourcing companies. The main discussion right now is how to manage the cost of the outsourcing business on the technology side in the meantime maintain the level of quality control level on the personnel side.

Outsourcing companies normally have technologies geared toward achieving this goal. The price for telecommunication hardware and equipment has been the main financial concern of most contact centers especially the outsourced ones.

There are also issues of connectivity, IPL reliability, and proximity to skilled workers. Positioning contact centers to highly skilled areas reduce the impact of having cheap labor by having additional costs on office maintenance and salary competitiveness.

If such a technology where a contact center queue can be routed to anywhere in the world at anytime even to a mobile phone, will it solve issues. To some it will. If such a technology exists and in spite of having agents work remotely from a contact center itself, will it resolve such issues? Maybe it does. If the technology still allows you to manage your agent’s skill routings, live queue management, live quality control monitoring and call recording? Will that reduce the loss of quality control? Probably. If the extra budget due to the reduction of sophisticated hardware and brick and mortar office are spent on US quality voice and not VoIP IPLs? Will that make the phone quality better? Most likely.

In the end, the virtual contact center technology has created as much questions as it has answered. It has solved a lot of problems yet created new ones. But aren’t these factors the same issues when outsourcing is still an infant? Aren’t these the same concerns when a company decides to go virtual? History has proven that it may not be for everyone, but if it’s for you. The impact to your business is enormous.

The technology is already here. It is ready, It can do inbound and outbound from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world. Monitor and manage real time anywhere in the world. The real question is. Would your business model benefit from having such technology on your side?

I guess it would.

Carlo Caparras is currently a marketing consultant for several ISP’s, webhosting, web development, web-services, outsourcing, colocation, and telecommunication companies including toll free express (http://www.tollfreeexpress.com)