This past year proved to be unlike any other time in recent history – for all of us. The COVID-19 pandemic brought with it, a year of great stress and uncertainty for many. However, it was also a time when the importance of our call center industry was thrust into the spotlight. 

The need for quick, reliable communication, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, proved to be crucial. Call centers all over the world became the hub of communication between businesses and customers, healthcare organizations and patients, and information lines and the general public.

As a company, we understood that we had a special responsibility to our customers because their call center agents were fulfilling a critical need for their communities. We reached out to our customers to find out what we could do to assist them, and decided to offer free operator licenses to help accommodate the emergency needs of our customers. In addition, we assisted in setting up emergency operator positions to connect businesses and hospitals with more of their customers and patients.

Our HIPAA-compliant miSecureMessages app is playing a key role to help keep communications secure and streamlined for employees who are working from home. Some of our own employees began working from home this year.

We assisted customers with running their call centers in a virtual server environment, or in the cloud, to give them the ability to use home-based operators. Remote operators are still playing a crucial role during the current COVID-19 outbreak.

As news and procedures regarding the coronavirus outbreak changed, our customers used custom call center scripting to guide agents through each call with the exact, up-to-date information they needed to provide about the latest information regarding COVID-19. The ability to easily edit scripting protocols meant frontline operators, working from any location, would have the most up-to-date information to provide to callers. 

Business continued for Amtelco with many Genesis implementations, remote customer training and product demonstrations, our annual 1Call Leadership and Training Seminar was held virtually, and we were even granted another patent approval.

We would also like to reassure both our customers and employees, that as a company, we are resilient. Since our beginning in 1976, we have seen – and overcame – challenging moments. Two of our core values are caring and perseverance, and these values are also at the core of our relationship with our customers and staff.  All of us were tested in 2020, but we have every confidence in our collective ability to meet the challenges we are confronted with and persevere together.