When you’re trying something new, like testing a web service or getting data from your dialplan, it’s important to be able to ensure the data you expect is where it’s supposed to be and in the form you expect.
Testing and Monitoring With Live Data
Small Tweaks Can Make a Big Impact for Usabilty
Mouse clicks. It’s no secret that reducing mouse clicks makes life easier for users. The fewer times you need to hear ‘click-click-click’ in the run of a day, the better off we all are. How did a relatively small tweak in the Q-Suite make a big impact for users?
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Your Call Center on the Go
Around the turn of the century, it was common to see websites suggesting “Best viewed in 800×640” or some other suggested resolution. As if the user had a choice of screen resolution when moving from site to site. It may have been a form of bragging: “Our site is so fancy you need a pretty good system to enjoy it.” Continue reading “Your Call Center on the Go”
Make Your Call Center Technology Work For You
Your call center is constantly having to deal with new challenges. Your client decides things now have to be done this way or that. Regulations change and now you need to record your data differently. Or not record it at all. A new business opportunity springs out of nowhere, and you have to respond quickly to capitalize. When you’re handling change every day, it’s important to have a flexible call center system. Our Q-Suite software is such a system.
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Four Keys To Soft Phone Delight
A colleague once visited a client site, and found their server room to be a nightmare. Among other things, they had insisted their telco give them a PRI connection due to the improved reliability they thought they’d get. They had also decided to use a PRI to SIP connection in the server room to allow the flexibility of moving the telphony connection from one server to another if needed. When Justin got there, he found a SIP to PRI device on the telco side, and a PRI to SIP device connecting in to Asterisk. Continue reading “Four Keys To Soft Phone Delight”
Your Leads, Your Rules
You may be using agent owned leads for at least some campaigns in your call center. It’s important to remember your agents don’t actually own the leads. Whether it’s just making sure the scheduled callback comes back to the correct agent, or if you’ve got a CRM integration where the same agent is expected to work the same lead, you may need to reassign those leads. Continue reading “Your Leads, Your Rules”
Open or Closed Relationship: Which One is Right for You?
Open source software has come a long way in the last few decades. What was once just a mash of code lying around that lacked features and actual usefulness and usability, can now be full-fledged solutions for individuals and companies alike. Is an open source based software solution right for you or your contact center though? Let’s compare a few points of interest. Continue reading “Open or Closed Relationship: Which One is Right for You?”
Give Your Callers Exits to Keep Them From Waiting
Waiting in an inbound queue until the next available agent is prepared to accept your call is an inevitable situation. If you’ve ever needed to call your service provider to add/cancel services or to place an order over the phone, you will run into this scenario. Using some of the available features in the Q-Suite, as a call center ACD administrator you can help ease the waiting times of your customers by providing manually triggered exits for the caller.
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The Startup Call Center – Be Nimble, Be Quick
“Moving at the speed of business” is a cute slogan, but if you’re trying to get your venture off the ground quickly, that may be too slow. You’ve got dozens of things you’re trying to get going at the same time, and you can’t wait. Odds are you’re using the Cloud for a large part of your infrastructure. Your customer service line shouldn’t be any different.
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3 Minor Annoyances of Not Having Physical Control Over Contact Center Hardware
A situation came up this week where we needed to collaborate with a server colocation in order to rebuild a server. Overall, the process was very smooth and went by without much of a hitch. However, not having full physical access to the server definitely slowed us up a bit. Here’s why:
- Communication Delays – Regardless of how quickly and efficiently your colocation company works, there are always going to be delays, even if they are extremely minor. Every time something was completed on their end, they would respond to an open ticket, either waiting for further instructions or a simple approval. If you housed your server on site and had a dedicated technician working on it, these small communication delays can be eliminated and your contact center can be back in action that much faster.
- Server Layout – Ideally, your servers for a particular contact center would be racked together in a logical order, connected to common networking equipment, and likely all accessible via some type of switching box, like KVM. While this may entirely be the case at the colocation, it’s not a 100% certainty that your servers will be arranged in this fashion. Having multiple points of access to the servers can cause issues if, for instance, the power strip that has 3 out of 6 servers on happens to malfunction.
- Server Room Access – You have no control who has access to the room or rooms where your servers are located. This can cause small random issues like in our particular instance this week where somehow an ethernet cable became unseated on the primary interface right before we were about to reintroduce the newly built server into the contact center. This caused bad things to happen but we caught it in time. We are not sure exactly how it happened, but cables that lock in place do not magically become unlocked. Someone likely accidentally moved or hit the cable enough to cause the network disruption. Once we opened a dialogue with them, someone needed to go in and reseat the cable, which took much longer than it would have if the servers were in house.
You can see fairly clearly that the three issues above are pretty minor overall and none were catastrophic in nature. I’ve talked before about using a hosted platform and how great it can be for certain people and my stance had definitely not changed there. But as with everything in life, nothing’s perfect.