Posts Tagged ‘Efficiency’

where can I find information regarding telemarketing efficiency?

i work for a company dedicated to the delivery of bank account monthly statements, and we want to start a call center… if the question is: “did you received your monthly statement?”… how can I learn about the expected efficiency of the calls?

Energy Efficiency is a Profit Center for Your Business

Don’t think of energy efficiency as Savings… Think of it as Profits.

By Michael Denby, J.D., Principal, Denby Energy, LLC www.denbyenergy.com

Saving businesses money by reducing energy use has significant rewards, but they are often overlooked in favor of more immediate, tangible returns. One of the overlooked benefits of energy savings programs is that they rarely have a one year return, but instead generate bottom line profits year after year.

Often company executives are in the dark when it comes to understanding the amount of money they actually pay for energy. They know with great certainty exactly how much they pay for each component that is used to create the widgets they sell, but they don’t know how much power their buildings and processes consume. And that is a significant gap in their business model.

This article shows how, by investing in energy savings, a business can make significant returns to the bottom line, year after year.

For purposes of this article, let’s assume that you own a small business with average energy bill of approximately $15,000 a year. If your business could reduce that energy bill by 30% by investing $4,000 in energy efficiency would it be worth it?

First, let’s look at the simple payback method. At $15,000 a year, a 30% savings would generate $4,500 in yearly savings. And if you were spending $4,000 to get that energy savings, you would have a simple payback period of .88 years, or about 10 and ½ months. For virtually all businesses, that is a very acceptable return on investment.

Second, let’s look beyond the simple payback method. Let’s look at the investment return over the life of the investment and see what it can do for us. For simplicity, let’s assume that the investments made to increase energy efficiency had a life of 7 years. The initial investment would have been paid off in 10 ½ months, but the benefit (profits) from that investment (returns) continue for the next 7 years. That means after the first year, the business will have 6 more years of those improvements generating a $4,500 return each and every year. The result?

Well since this is a Series question we input $4,500 a year as our “A”, with 6 years as our “n” and 5% as our “i”. The answer comes out to $30,608.55 in total returns(profits) over those 7 years.

Now, let’s look at one alternative – instead of investing back into their business, the owner takes that $4,000 as a payout and puts it into her retirement account. For purposes of this example, let’s assume her retirement account is earning a really strong return of 10% (despite the economic turndown). The $4,000 is a one-time investment, so it runs as a Single Sum Series. After 7 years she would have a total of $7,794. That means she would have left $22,814 on the table. Or better defined, she would have paid the local utility companies $22,814 more than she paid herself for the privilege of wasting energy.

(c) 2008 Denby Energy, LLC  All Rights Reserved.

Energy Efficiency in the Data Center

Hardware, licenses, applications, remote hands, even the expense of redundancyâ??none of it compares to the price of power in the data center; and power needs are increasing exponentially as processing intensifies and demand for rack space rises.

More Power Equals More Heat

Data center power is partly to keep physical servers running, but itâ??s also to keep them cool enough to run: as servers increase in processing power, so does heat generation. A rack that five years ago produced about five kilowatts of heat may today produce as much as 28 kilowatts. To give some idea of how much heat that is: 28 kilowatts equals 95,000 BTU or roughly 8 tons of air conditioning. A typical house air conditioner is three tons, 10 kilowatts, or 34,000 BTU. That means that it takes as much power to cool a high density rack as it would to cool about three single family homesâ??if it was high noon in that equatorial neighborhood 24 hours a day.

Sources of Inefficiency

Data centers have traditionally been inefficient environmentally. Compared to other costs, power has been cheap, and computing preciousâ??if a little power was wasted, the result was incredible amounts of information analyzed, communicated and stored. The world seemed to have plenty of power, and a data center from the 70s or even the 80s would only be a blip on the power grid.

These days, data centers are much more prevalent: the Data Center Map, a free web service linking data center providers and customers, lists 1,297 colocation data centers in 59 countries. In addition, power has become more expensive and less available. However, data centers still use power like itâ??s cheap: a McKinsey & Company report on data center efficiency, released in 2008, says that on average, only six percent of server capacity is being used, and the data center facilities run at no more than about 56 percent capacity.

Three Ways to Cool Down the Data Centerâ??and Save Money

Virtualization, resource management and physical server consolidation are three methods your hosting company and you can use to increase data center efficiency.

Virtualize Servers

One way to conserve power is to get every bit of computing power out of each piece of hardware. Thatâ??s where virtualization comes in. Virtualization allows you to consolidate your server requirements onto fewer physical machines, with the virtual machines consuming only about 1/50th the amount of power. Email servers, web servers and applications all act just as if they were running on individual boxes, but for a fraction of the cost, both in capital expense and power consumption.

According to many sources, including The Green Grid and the EPA, virtualization is one of the key ingredients of a more efficient, greener data center. In implementing virtualization, a product such as VMware provides some of the highest consolidation rates on a secure and reliable platform. With VMware, unused physical servers can even be powered off, and turned back on when needed.

Of course, virtual servers, especially VMwareâ??s hardware-based virtualization, also offer increased application access for users, faster installation of new servers and better uptime. So not only will your virtual servers help reduce your carbon footprint and save you money, theyâ??ll also improve your companyâ??s competitiveness.

Allocate Resources with VMware DRS and DPM

Virtualization from VMware provides two additional technologies that help you reduce your costs through virtualization.

VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) allows a hosting company and its clients to continuously monitor utilization and intelligently assign resources as needed. With DRS, resources can be allocated to higher priority applications, according to your rules, ensuring that your mission critical activities always have what they need. It also provides dedicated infrastructure for business units, without letting resources stand idle.

Supporting DRS, Distributed Power Management (DPM) optimizes power consumption by continuously monitoring power usage and automatically consolidating workloads and powering down unneeded resources. During lower use periods, DPM moves virtual server workloads onto the optimum number of physical servers and turns off the others. When requirements increase, DPM brings physical servers back onlineâ??without impact on the virtual server or the customer.

Consolidate Servers with Blades

Blades help reduce the energy footprint of servers by allowing multiple physical servers to be consolidated on one chassis, with one management interface per blade, while adding more advanced management features. The ProLiant BL490c Virtualization Blade solution being adopted by Infinitely Virtual will more than triple the number of virtual machines hosted in the same energy footprint.

According to HP, the BL 490c blades offer several key performance and management advantages: eighteen DIMM slots allow more virtual machines to be housed on each blade; integrated dual-port 10 GbE server adapter with Flex-10 technology offer the ability to fine-tune network bandwidth; conserve power without performance impact with the built-in HP Power Regulator, and reclaim trapped power in your data center by safely limiting server power consumption with Dynamic Power Capping.

The Future of the Green Data Center

Projects and organizations are being formed all over the world to address the problems of power consumption and heat generation. Here are three:

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are working to reduce the portion of electricity used to cool data center equipment by as much as 15 percent. In a simulated data center, Georgia Tech scientists are trying to optimize cooling strategies and develop new heat transfer models.

The Green Grid is an organization created by many of the big names in computers, power conditioning and data centers, including HP, AMD and Intel. Together, they are developing standards to measure data center efficiency, with the goal of reducing power requirements, waste heat and carbon emissions.

In the future, waste heat like that in a data center could be recycled into energy. Engineers at Oregon State University are taking waste heat and using it to run a cooling system.

To Save Money (and Help Save the Planet), Think Infinitely Virtual

Contact Infinitely Virtual to find out how virtualization and data center efficiency affect your companyâ??s bottom line. Let us show you how hosting with Infinitely Virtual can help you reduce your companyâ??s server costs, while simultaneously making your applications faster, your data more secure, and your planet a little bit cooler.

Find out more about the power and cooling advantages of VMware, HP Blade servers and virtualization at InfinitelyVirtual.com. Hardware, licenses, applications, remote hands, even the expense of redundancyâ??none of it compares to the price of power in the data center; and power needs are increasing exponentially as processing intensifies and demand for rack space rises.

More Power Equals More Heat

Data center power is partly to keep physical servers running, but itâ??s also to keep them cool enough to run: as servers increase in processing power, so does heat generation. A rack that five years ago produced about five kilowatts of heat may today produce as much as 28 kilowatts. To give some idea of how much heat that is: 28 kilowatts equals 95,000 BTU or roughly 8 tons of air conditioning. A typical house air conditioner is three tons, 10 kilowatts, or 34,000 BTU. That means that it takes as much power to cool a high density rack as it would to cool about three single family homesâ??if it was high noon in that equatorial neighborhood 24 hours a day.

Sources of Inefficiency

Data centers have traditionally been inefficient environmentally. Compared to other costs, power has been cheap, and computing preciousâ??if a little power was wasted, the result was incredible amounts of information analyzed, communicated and stored. The world seemed to have plenty of power, and a data center from the 70s or even the 80s would only be a blip on the power grid.

These days, data centers are much more prevalent: the Data Center Map, a free web service linking data center providers and customers, lists 1,297 colocation data centers in 59 countries. In addition, power has become more expensive and less available. However, data centers still use power like itâ??s cheap: a McKinsey & Company report on data center efficiency, released in 2008, says that on average, only six percent of server capacity is being used, and the data center facilities run at no more than about 56 percent capacity.

Three Ways to Cool Down the Data Centerâ??and Save Money

Virtualization, resource management and physical server consolidation are three methods your hosting company and you can use to increase data center efficiency.

Virtualize Servers

One way to conserve power is to get every bit of computing power out of each piece of hardware. Thatâ??s where virtualization comes in. Virtualization allows you to consolidate your server requirements onto fewer physical machines, with the virtual machines consuming only about 1/50th the amount of power. Email servers, web servers and applications all act just as if they were running on individual boxes, but for a fraction of the cost, both in capital expense and power consumption.

According to many sources, including The Green Grid and the EPA, virtualization is one of the key ingredients of a more efficient, greener data center. In implementing virtualization, a product such as VMware provides some of the highest consolidation rates on a secure and reliable platform. With VMware, unused physical servers can even be powered off, and turned back on when needed.

Of course, virtual servers, especially VMwareâ??s hardware-based virtualization, also offer increased application access for users, faster installation of new servers and better uptime. So not only will your virtual servers help reduce your carbon footprint and save you money, theyâ??ll also improve your companyâ??s competitiveness.

Allocate Resources with VMware DRS and DPM

Virtualization from VMware provides two additional technologies that help you reduce your costs through virtualization.

VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) allows a hosting company and its clients to continuously monitor utilization and intelligently assign resources as needed. With DRS, resources can be allocated to higher priority applications, according to your rules, ensuring that your mission critical activities always have what they need. It also provides dedicated infrastructure for business units, without letting resources stand idle.

Supporting DRS, Distributed Power Management (DPM) optimizes power consumption by continuously monitoring power usage and automatically consolidating workloads and powering down unneeded resources. During lower use periods, DPM moves virtual server workloads onto the optimum number of physical servers and turns off the others. When requirements increase, DPM brings physical servers back onlineâ??without impact on the virtual server or the customer.

Consolidate Servers with Blades

Blades help reduce the energy footprint of servers by allowing multiple physical servers to be consolidated on one chassis, with one management interface per blade, while adding more advanced management features. The ProLiant BL490c Virtualization Blade solution being adopted by Infinitely Virtual will more than triple the number of virtual machines hosted in the same energy footprint.

According to HP, the BL 490c blades offer several key performance and management advantages: eighteen DIMM slots allow more virtual machines to be housed on each blade; integrated dual-port 10 GbE server adapter with Flex-10 technology offer the ability to fine-tune network bandwidth; conserve power without performance impact with the built-in HP Power Regulator, and reclaim trapped power in your data center by safely limiting server power consumption with Dynamic Power Capping.

The Future of the Green Data Center

Projects and organizations are being formed all over the world to address the problems of power consumption and heat generation. Here are three:

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are working to reduce the portion of electricity used to cool data center equipment by as much as 15 percent. In a simulated data center, Georgia Tech scientists are trying to optimize cooling strategies and develop new heat transfer models.

The Green Grid is an organization created by many of the big names in computers, power conditioning and data centers, including HP, AMD and Intel. Together, they are developing standards to measure data center efficiency, with the goal of reducing power requirements, waste heat and carbon emissions.

In the future, waste heat like that in a data center could be recycled into energy. Engineers at Oregon State University are taking waste heat and using it to run a cooling system.

To Save Money (and Help Save the Planet), Think Infinitely Virtual

Contact Infinitely Virtual to find out how virtualization and data center efficiency affect your companyâ??s bottom line. Let us show you how hosting with Infinitely Virtual can help you reduce your companyâ??s server costs, while simultaneously making your applications faster, your data more secure, and your planet a little bit cooler.

Find out more about the power and cooling advantages of VMware, HP Blade servers and virtualization at InfinitelyVirtual.com.

Efficiency is the Key to Survival in Call Center

With economic downward spiral, most companies are trying to either hold on to their existing customers or tap on verticals they did not cater to earlier. All this customer interaction is provided with the help of call centers. Call centers have been critical arm of the business that helps businesses provide satisfaction to their customer base. Whether business is into manufacturing or servicing, call centers have become a medium to reach out to their customers.

Call centers with high data center, big servers and a whole team of IT professionals are no more required. Currently most of the call centers are adopting for call center software companies that provide hosted solution. No call center equipment are required to set their operations.

Hosted contact center solution has full set of functionality as traditional with additional set of advantages. One of the biggest saving are realized with their VoIP backbone. These VoIP call centers have dialers that either dial or take calls of customers and routes it to different agents that could be remotely located in any part of the world.

Along with total telecoms these hosted call centers also provide dialers like auto dialers and predictive dialers to help call centers improve their agents efficiency. Once efficiency is realized the call center can get more projects and in hosted call center solution they can increase their operations to match the demand.

Also hosted call center solution allows the voip call centers to save on capex cost and ensure they can hire skilled agents anywhere in the world. Obelyx solution helps your voip call center gain all these objectives at low cost.

The Efficiency of Call Center Software

Call center software is like a productive support for various call center businesses. It acts as one of the most important aspect that contributes to the growth of BPO sector. As it is essential for every call center to perform with due proficiency it become almost important for them to employ some systematic software and functions that can provide them a lot of benefits. And it is here that call center software help them a lot.

Call center software generally comes in different forms and varieties. Though, they all perform with standardized quality but their features are almost different. However, the most unique feature of this software is concerned with its implementation or execution from any location. For instance, you can persuade your call center agents to work from home this will save your lot of money and will provide you quality work. However, with the help of call center software you can easily scrutinize their work if you want to keep close watch on their performance. This whole process will increase your business in terms of both money and clients.

Following are some call center software that utilized in call center industry:

Predictive dialer
IVR
CTI
Voice mail & PBX
Auto dialer

This software generally operates in call center industry where customer is considered as a top priority. Apart from this, it can also handle call tracking process to data analysis and can maintain both inbound and outbound calling process.

Call center software can systemize voice messaging for straight marketing procedures, leaving computerized messages on voice mail and answering machines that are reached by this method. When a call is transferred to an agent it can save a lot of time of the agents and ultimately enhance their productivity.

Find the best deals of call center software from www.yoursautodialer.com

Improving Productivity & Efficiency In A Customer Service Call Center

To survive in today’s competitive environment, businesses need to find ways to enhance the customer experience. Today’s customer not only knows exactly what he wants, but ensures that he gets value for his hard-earned money. Now, if a business wants to go further than merely surviving and seek sustained success, it has to enhance the productivity and efficiency of its customer service call center. With more and more businesses outsourcing this service, it becomes all the more for a call center service provider to offer that extra competitive edge to the businesses it serves. Here are some ways in which you can ensure that your call center stands above the rest.

Tips on Improving Productivity & Efficiency in a Customer Service Call Center

Studies have shown that just by increasing the size of a computer monitor, productivity and efficiency can be increased by 40%. There are also findings that support that this figure can go up to 65% by including a secondary monitor. On the other hand, the placement of the keyboard and mouse, the comfort in seating, etc, raises productivity and efficiency by 20%.

Here are some simple steps you can take to enhance your revenues and control costs through maximizing productivity and efficiency at a customer service call center:

Reason for contact – The first area that one needs to address is the reason for the customer contacting the call center. If you can understand the reasons why most customers contact you, you can explore ways to ensure that a process is put in place so that the handling of the issue takes the least possible time. On the other hand, understanding the reasons for contact could also help you give feedback to the business you are catering to as a call center and weed out the reason for contact altogether. This data can be collected through customer surveys, call coding, IVR or simply by using a tick sheet.

Documenting processes – The best way to track down inconsistencies and identify areas that need improvement is through documentation. Not only will this help reduce the time taken to complete tasks, it can also reduce the volume of calls that you receive.

Enhancing cross-skills – Economies of scale can be achieved by clubbing together skills that logically go together and training employees in multi-skills. This also helps to reduce the burn-out rate, thereby decreasing absenteeism and attrition. Multiple skills also enhances the customer experience and reduces the turn-around time for calls.

Reducing attrition – One issue that plagues most call centers and leads to a decline in productivity and efficiency is the about 40% attrition rate that this industry is witness to. Knowledge and experience go a long way in providing good customer service. The attempt to enhance staff retention has to begin right from the recruitment stage. A large number of call center experience short-term attrition, where the employee leaves within 6 months of being appointed. This kind of attrition can be addressed through appropriate selection procedures. The induction process, where the employee is trained on the job and acclimatized to the company culture, is also an important phase to ensure retention.

Review and measurement – Reviewing and assessing performance is not only a great way to discover areas that need improvement but it s also a way to motivate people to learn and grow in their job.

One customer service call center provider that has an enviable track record of serving satisfied customers is InSO International Call Center. This company has completed more than 200 call center campaigns and has over 10 years of exclusive experience in the call center segment. To know more about the company, visit http://www.inso.us.

Call Center Efficiency

Predictive Dialing is a call center tool used to generate higher margin talk time for teleworkers. The predictive dialer works by using a variety of algorithms to predict both the availability of agents and called party answers, adjusting the calling process to the number of agents it anticipates (or predicts) will be available. This article was prepared to educate the differences and postivies and negatives.

Traditional predictive dialers use auto dialing with voice messaging, with teleworkers who are prepared to handle calls initiated by the dialer. Answering machines, busy signals, and no answer calls are processed in a manner similar to that of a new-age hosed predictive dialing system. However, when a ‘live’ answer is detected, the dialer plays an introductory recorded message, giving the call recipient the option to talk with an agent to complete the transaction. This message is a consistent greeting that identifies the caller, the nature of the call, and the option to speak with an agent. This process requires a more sophisticated predictive algorithm to ensure that a phone agent is available when the call recipient asks to speak with an agent. Analyzing the pros and cons of the traditional predictive method and then further delving into the hosted variety of predictive dialing you can see which method is right for you.

Pros of Traditional Predictive Dialing:

. Call lists are pre-qualified without the introductory need for an agent

. Fewer agents are required to handle far more calls

. Agents are only speaking with interested callers

. Call list processing is far less expensive

Cons of Traditional method:

. Overall list performance may be less due to call recipient resistance to recorded messages

. Certain U.S. states do not allow recorded messaging (unless prior business relationship has been established). This may limit the use of this technique to only certain types of business or consumer campaigns in certain geographical areas.

Hosted predictive dialers

Hosted predictive dialers (aka Virtual Predictive Dialers, Web-Enabled Predictive Dialers, VoIP Predictive Dialers) use the Software as a Service (SaaS) model to provide organizations and individuals with a predictive dialer capability. Typically, the only requirement for a firm to use a hosted predictive dialer system is a computer with an Internet connection and a telephone line for each agent.

Pros:

. No required investments in computer or telephone hardware

. No required investments in software or licenses

. Administration and support are handled by the service provider

. Links into the system are remote, enabling agents and supervisors to connect from any location

Cons:

- Service is dependent on an Internet connection; when the Internet goes down, so does the service.