There are a lot of call centers that aren’t open around the clock. You may have one. It makes sense – it’s hard to staff all hours, and you may not really need to. So you close at a certain time. After that, callers get an after hours message, an answering service, or something else. But is that fair?
Think about it for a minute. If you are open until midnight Eastern time, easterners can call you late in the night, but callers on the west coast had better call before 9pm. Sure, you can stay open until midnight Pacific time, but now you’ve just extended the advantage easterners have. And how do your Hawaiian clients feel about the whole thing?
One option that’s available is to have a different toll free number coming into different dialplans with different schedules. If you call into the East Coast number, you can call as long as the schedule for that dialplan says. Call into the Central number, and your call is handled until that schedule winds up. And so on. It’s a simple and straightforward solution. This way, you can stagger your agent schedules to handle the expected call flows, and clients everywhere have the same hours of availability. Unless somebody can find the Pacific number. Maybe through the magic of the Internet.
There is another way. Anybody with an outbound dialer (hopefully) has a time of day check to verify if calling is legal at that time. Checking the caller ID of the caller versus such a system should be fairly straightforward. Maybe if it’s not legal to call them, you don’t accept a call from them. Alternatively, you can do a look up table of area codes or country codes, and check those. In many cases, the time zone is the same across these divisions, so it’s not too cumbersome to do the checking versus the first X digits of the caller ID.
By doing this, you make sure that you’re ensuring the same number of hours of availability for all your clients. In the worst case, you may have someone with mangled, missing or unaccounted for caller ID getting extended service. However, in most cases, you’re distributing fairness along with the calls in the queue.