When considering cost-cutting measures, organizations must think about the value of customers before bottom-line savings, especially when it relates to selling directly to consumers or relying on human interaction to assist with inquiries.  Although off-shore call centers are proving to be a financially prudent method of customer service for specific types of non-interactive queries, the virtual call center is becoming the next generation model that enables an enhanced customer experience.  Alpine Access trains and employs a cadre of home-based agents that either assume or augment a client’s customer service staff.  The virtual, or home-based agent, model allows Alpine Access to attract more experienced and professionally mature agents that are better equipped to address complex customer issues and exploit up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.   The virtual call center model has enabled Alpine Access to lower attrition and raise agent loyalty to a level higher than traditional brick and mortar call centers.   

Training and routing calls to decentralized agents domestically, or even overseas, is only one example of the way in which the Web is changing how call centers operate.  While the benefits of the virtual call center are clear, the paradigm faced some initial challenges.  Specifically, how to rapidly and effectively train geographically dispersed independent agents, while testing and validating their knowledge before putting them in front of customers.  ePath Learning’s ASAP, one of the first eLearning solutions to combine the power of a database management system with the global reach of the Internet, enabled the Alpine Access training team to create and deploy courses and tests to agents quickly, in some cases in as little as a few days. 

“One-hundred percent of Alpine Access’ training is done on a distance learning basis, which in turn translates into measurable results and better performance for clients,” said Dudley Molina, President and CEO of ePath Learning.  “Agent training, one of the key issues to the success of the virtual call center model, is rigorous and includes not only client products and technology, but client culture and corporate procedures which are necessary in preserving and growing the customer relationship…in a way, this is CRM at its best.”

“ePath Learning’s Web-based training tool allows us to effectively train our agents, ultimately delivering a higher level of service to our clients while utilizing an underserved U.S. based employee pool.  We track class schedules and progress, where learners are in the training process and identify when our agents can go live in support of a client,” said Jim Ball, co-founder and chief architect of Alpine Access.  “We did not want our business model to be constrained by our IT systems.  ePath Learning is so flexible that we were easily able to integrate their technology with ours allowing even greater synergies to be gained.” 

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