Virtual Hold a leader in call queue positioning solutions. Founded in 1995, it is a private company headquartered in Akron, Ohio (USA). The company has offices in the US, Europe and Australia. Its customer based spans North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand and cuts across all vertical markets, including finance, health care and insurance, utilities and US and other government. Virtual Hold’s solutions enable businesses and more specifically contact centers, to manage the customer experience prior to the customer connecting to agents.
Virtual Hold flagship products are, Rendezvous, and Concierge. Concierge manages the customer’s place in line when the estimated wait-time exceeds a customer-defined threshold. The solution announces the estimated hold time and asks the caller if he or she would like a call back. Concierge will then hold the customer’s place in the queue and will launch a call to the phone number of the customer’s choice and connect him or her to an agent when the customer reaches the front of the line. Rendezvous also asks the customer if he or she would like a call back, but will also ask for a specific date and time. The solution provides administrative interfaces so that contact center management can define when call back will be made.
Virtual Hold has three new products due in 2010. Webconnect will provide tools and interfaces that will enable customers to connect to the contact center thought a business’ web page. Rapport will be a proactive notification solution, allowing businesses to announce new product releases and special offers, verify appointment times and dates, and provide other information among other functions. Finally, Virtual Hold will be releasing a set of connection tools that will enable businesses to build sophisticated collaboration applications via mobile phone, web pages, and agent desktops.
Virtual Hold’s Concierge and Rendezvous supplies businesses with flexible solutions that have a positive affect customer satisfaction. And both solutions offer connection tools to all the major contact center solution vendors. Virtual Hold is well known in the contact center market for its products and offers well documented ROI metrics regarding scheduled callback.
The solutions allow contact centers to manage their call flow more effectively in an era of downsizing and increased demands on performance. Typically, when contact centers downsize, the wait times increase. However, by allowing customers to request a call back rather than hanging on hold, businesses empower customers to manage their own time rather than conforming to the time frames set by the contact center.
Virtual Hold’s major competition is customers who do not see the need to provide callbacks. In addition, most of the major contact center vendors, such as Avaya and Cisco, and offer queue position management solutions. While Virtual Hold’s solutions offer more features and advanced functions than solutions offered by the communication solution vendors, these other vendors can claim their solutions provide closer interoperability and have greater flexibility in pricing because the solutions offered are part of the vendor’s overall portfolio.
Overall, Virtual Hold is a sound company with a worthwhile set of product. Its current solutions offer value to contact centers through improved customer satisfaction, while its forth coming products will provide additional value to multi-channel contact centers. Companies looking for ways to improve customer satisfaction and those contact centers with long wait times should investigate Virtual Hold and its products.
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