The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5) - Questions for the call center people

Questions for the call center people

Those of you who work with call centers, would you like to tell me:

(1) What function do you perform - tele-calling in a voice process (inbound or outbound), web process (back office), sales, marketing etc.
(2) What is your daily routine at work like? Those 8 hours.
(3) What software from which vendor do you use?
(4) How are your emails or tele-calls monitored?
(5) Is there information related to work that you have to share outside of the software you use to log your work in? Like may be sending a file via email using Outlook. Or using a calender or contact management system to store customer info, because you do not have an order management system to store *everything* about a customer?

Sathyaish Chakravarthy
Sunday, May 9, 2004

Sathyaish, to put this bluntly, posting 5 questions in a row makes you look like a wacko. Don't spam the board.

Richard Kuo
Sunday, May 9, 2004

LOL!

Brutalacus
Sunday, May 9, 2004

I worked for a company whose product is a VoiceXML interpreter, and I attended a conference for call center people.

You might like to browse http://www.iccm.com/

The software (from whatever vendor) that provides (inbound) call distribution to agents, or which connects (outbound) calls to agents, will provide supervisory facilities for monitoring the call.

One of the issues being addressed by software vendors is the idea that companies have seperated "silos" of data, from voice contacts and email contacts, that the software should integrate.

Christopher Wells
Sunday, May 9, 2004

"Sathyaish, to put this bluntly, posting 5 questions in a row makes you look like a wacko."

It's the weekend... don't you know that Sathyaish posts 4-6 questions, in a row, every weekend?

He's more wacko than you think... :)

Almost Anonymous
Sunday, May 9, 2004

My company makes an platform of products to run a call-center. I won't say the name of my company because I'd like to remain semi-anonymous.

1.) yes, yes, yes, yes.
2.) software maintenance and development, all day.
3.) ours
4.) our "Agent" program can record phone calls and the data-entry screen.
5.) our software only needs a few pieces of info like the customer's phone number and their account number. All the data entry happens in a screen that the client builds themself with our screen builder and usually the data gets stored in the clients own database.

Wayne
Sunday, May 9, 2004

Come on, guys, give Sathyaish a break. The guy's obviously got an insatiable desire to learn, so just answer his question or move on.

Sathyaish-Defender
Sunday, May 9, 2004

Thank you, Christopher, for that very useful link to ICCM.

Sathyaish Chakravarthy
Tuesday, May 11, 2004

Thank you, Wayne, for your valuable opinion. I shall have more to ask you soon.

Sathyaish Chakravarthy
Tuesday, May 11, 2004

My company also makes a platform of products to run contact centers (inbound, outbound, predictive, email, chat, ...). Just as Wayne, I prefer to be semi-anonymous, however, you can e-mail me for further information.

(1) Function: Implementing our software in the contact centers. Assessment, analysis, implementation, etc.
(2) Daily routine: between developer & project manager - lots of international travel.
(3) Software used: our own, of course, e-mail for detail.
(4) Contact monitoring: possible with our software.
(5) Information to be entered in other systems: It happens with clients, mostly because there is no interface to their program to enter this information from the screenpop (or they are too cheap to have it developed).

Mark Tetrode
Tuesday, May 11, 2004