Call Center Outsourcing: A Strategic Connection

The benefit most often cited about outsourcing call center services is that it enables companies to better focus on their core competencies. However, FFP Global believes this is a very incomplete, if not flawed assessment as it suggests that customer interactions do not have strategic implications. Today, a customer interaction in all its forms, whether an inbound phone call, web chat or email exchange, can have a profound multiplier effect and bottom line impact when these experiences good or bad instantly traverse online media and social networking spaces and pick up a life of their own.

Short Messages

Much has been made of Barack Obama using text messaging to announce his Vice President selection. It was estimated that 2.9 million text messages went out – representing one of the largest mobile marketing events to date.

The Obama campaign has been aggressively using emerging communication technologies and applications such as SMS, Social Networks and Email. For many young people (a key Obama target), who don’t have landline phones, being connected means having a mobile device on them at all time. Accordingly, Obama’s technology push is very much a necessity.

Text Messaging or Short Message Service (abbreviated as SMS) means the transmission of short text messages to and from a mobile phone, fax machine and/or IP address. Messages must be no longer than 160 alpha-numeric characters and contain no images or graphics.

The reason SMS was late to takeoff in the United States was the incompatibility between carriers, so if you wanted to sent a text to an AT&T subscriber if you were a T Mobile subscriber, it wouldn’t work.