On-demand software for call centres

Transera Communications, a California-based call centre management software provider, on Monday said that it has, along with Novatel, a Texas-based communication equipment provider for call centres, come up with a new solution for the outsourced call centre market.

The new call management software, Seratel, according to Prem Uppaluru, president and CEO, Transera Communications, has a greater value proposition in the BPO market and will reduce the cost of ownership by 45-50 per cent.

The key feature of this new "on-demand global IP call centre" is that there is no upfront capital investment and outsourcers pay for it as they use it. He added that the software is based on open standards and therefore customers are not locked into proprietary solutions.

Uppaluru added that most of the outsourcers today spend huge amounts of capital ahead of revenue generation and most of the call centre technology comes in boxes where outsourcers are forced to buy extra capacity to manage the peak traffic in a call centre. This diverts financial and human resources to non-core operations.

He said that the company's latest call management solution will globalise operations without any infrastructure investment and will maintain a centralised queue to manage and distribute calls across sites in a heterogenous call centre environment. The software will also work as a centralised point of control for managing and monitoring calls.

Uppaluru added that in another 3-4 years the number of call centre agents in India is expected to go upto 4 lakh, with most of them serving MNCs. With the relaxation of rules for BPOs the company expects a shift from today's primary market of serving customers in the UK and USA.