AsteriskGuru Archives

operations.jabeens at gma · Guest

I initially sent this email with a wrong subject line which seem to be the culprit as I failed to attarct any eye ball or response. Why I wonder? Would not be something like this discussion a good thing for the group. Forget the fact that it may actually help me to move forward with setting up a call center operation sometime.

Anyway, let me take the opportunity of this newborn list and present a fundamental discussion topic for present 99+ and counting members of this list.

I am sure that there are many veteran and seasoned business and technical guru of call center development and marketing within this list.

I am a newbie in this segment but recently seriously exploring a unique opportunity to set-up a call center operations in Bangladesh. The objective is to serve North American customers from this Bangladesh based call center and take advantage of relatively low cost of labor (tech savvy and good English accent) to offer aggressive pricing. It will be 20-30 seat center with hardware and infrastructure readily available.

I was wondering whether I could tap into your knowledge base and get solid advise on:

1. Asterisk based Hardware and software design for servers and agents including admin, monitoring, QOS, billing and invoicing.

2. How to effectively tap into potential market of customers, market segment and few leads if possible. I am open to any partnership suggestion from anyone who may already have customers or looking for diversification and cost efficiency or can easily generate new customer from USA.

Looking forward to your inputs.

Thanks,
Ifte Islam
JTel LLC
445 Elmcroft Blvd Suite 8109 Rockville MD 20850
Tel : 301 792 3849 Fax : 301 792 3838

stotaro at totarotechnolo · Guest

cbergstrom at netsyncro.c · Guest

Steve Totaro wrote:

operations.jabeens at gma · Guest

Steve:

Thanks for taking time to respond.

Now I understand that perhaps I was bit vague in establishing my rational behnid my previous email.

The idea was not to seek business leads or help me personally in setting up call center without any potential mutual benefit. We all know there is nothing called free lunch --unless you are a some sort of celebrity like Sakira or JLo. My real objective was to stir up a discussion on fundamentals of call center. I was looking for generating rich exchange of ideas and options, perils and victories, case studies and best practices --to be compiled into a Idiot's Guide on Call Center using Open Source. Hope now you are clear about it.

Thanks for your suggestions and advise on my potential venture in Bangladesh. Quite useful.

I refrained from explicitly mention that all local arrangements including licensing,infrastructure, premises, computers and equipments, local bandwidth, staff etc will be arranged by me and my affiliates based in Bangladesh. At this point, we were looking for established Call Center entities who may like to partner with us to divert their existing call volumes to our planned facility and possibly gain from pricing parity advantage and better quality services. Also, since we are at design stage, we could cater to specific requirements of such services in terms of software and service provisioning point of views.

Lastly, yes, accent is an issue which applies to any non-English speaking country, be it India, Bangladesh, Russia or Madagascar. But there are remedies. I know several Indian company is actually using special audio visual training completion as a prerequisite before putting agents into work and have largely overcame the issue.

By the way accent is very subjective, even within USA southern accent is different than Californian accent, have you compared British accent with New Yorkers?

Thanks,
Ifte

Steve Totaro wrote:

I think the lack of response to your questions is because you are asking
someone else to do your homework on asterisk, write your business plan
for you, and provide paying customers.

The answers to your #1 questions are all on the Wiki.  Try the different
packages that are available and see what works best for you.  If nothing
works the way you want, then write your own software or pay someone to
do it for you.

The answers to your #2 questions are basically trade secrets.  Do you
really expect anyone on this list to just give you leads?!?  You are
looking for a partnership with someone with existing customers yet have
nothing to offer in return.

Maybe you should change your subject line to "Please write my business
plan, design my call center system and give me customers"

The other thing that is quickly becoming apparent to US companies
outsourcing call centers to foreign countries, many Americans cannot
stand it.
http://www.destinationcrm.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=4620

I would base my marketing on "no accent" if I were you.

My advice to you is dive in.  Put together something that works well and
then look for customers or partners.

"Build it and they will come"

Thanks,
Steve

On 12/6/05, Steve Totaro <stotaro@totarotechnologies.com (stotaro@totarotechnologies.com)> wrote: