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Getting it Right When Some Get it Wrong

Non-Call media call center

There’s a fast-service restaurant near my house that specializes in frozen dairy products. Let’s say it rhymes with Fairy Shmeen. My order is usually something fairly simple. The drive-thru experience is usually pretty quick and painless. Sometimes, however, there’s a problem, and I have to repeat my order several times. Sometimes I have to repeat it after I’ve gotten to the window. Each time there’s a problem, it’s the same girl taking my order. I’m sure she’s an excellent employee. Maybe seniority dictates that she should have the headset. But she can’t seem to get the hang of it. At least not in my case.
Continue reading “Getting it Right When Some Get it Wrong”

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More Storage Needed! Ways to Increase Your Contact Center’s Capacity

We’re heading on a bit of a vacation this weekend. I needed to install the roof rails and cargo carrier on the vehicle because we just don’t have enough room in the trunk area for all the things we will be bringing. More storage was necessary so we made the adjustment. You may have to make a few adjustments as well in your contact center in order to increase the amount of accessible storage space. Continue reading “More Storage Needed! Ways to Increase Your Contact Center’s Capacity”

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Small Tips for Keeping Your Contact Center ACD Running Smoothly

This idea sort of came to me as I dropped off my vehicle this morning to get maintenance done due to two recalls. The letter I received in the mail described the issues quite nicely and while neither of the fixes were completely critical, ie. my vehicle won’t explode, they were definitely recommended as they will certainly help sustain the vehicle’s longevity. Plus, getting recalls done is free, so why not right? Here’s a few pointers on how you can keep your contact center ACD running smoothly. Continue reading “Small Tips for Keeping Your Contact Center ACD Running Smoothly”

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Putting Your Web Service to the Test

As you can guess from recent topics, web services have been a hot issue around here. Whether it’s in the dialplan or the agent scripting, we find that call centers are increasingly looking for live data delivered in real time, and web services are a great way to do this.

Where things do sometimes falter is on initial setup and testing. Hours and hours get spent diagnosing whether an issue is on the remote side or in the way the receiver is interpreting the data. Tests get set up and run, the results are checked, then some incremental change is made and the test run again.

It really doesn’t have to be that complicated.

There are a couple of tools that we use to help cut down the testing and verification time:

1) Just create a file and have it downloaded. 

If you’re sending a request and expecting an XML or JSON file with certain fields back, just create a simple valid case in the form of a file. Break out your favourite text editor and write it out.  It could be something as simple as:


Continue reading “Putting Your Web Service to the Test”

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Keeping Minions Under Control: Quality Monitoring Tools for Your Contact Center ACD

Those little yellow characters from the Despicable Me movies are getting their own stand alone film and it’s out this weekend. If you are like me, you find them absolutely hilarious and chuckle every time you see them do anything, so the film should be highly entertaining I would think. They can go a little off the rails at times if you don’t keep them under control and the same behavior has a possibility of occurring at your contact center, with less than hysterical results. Here are a few tools you can use to help limit those events in the contact center. Continue reading “Keeping Minions Under Control: Quality Monitoring Tools for Your Contact Center ACD”

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Broken Knight: Consequences of Rushing into Production

Tuesday June 23rd was a huge day for people like me in the video game world. Batman: Arkham Knight was releasing and all of the reviews had been stellar. Reviews were glowing about how flawlessly the game ran and performed on the PS4, which made me incredibly happy as the PS4 is my platform of choice. However, the PC port of the game was a complete disaster. The game was so broken on PC that the publisher has stopped selling the PC version until it is fixed. That is quite a blow to all the PC players out there and puts a really ugly stamp on the game itself. The game itself had been delayed twice, and it appears that even with these delays, the PC version was still rushed into production. Continue reading “Broken Knight: Consequences of Rushing into Production”

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Common Sense and the Contact Center ACD

Here are a quick hitters about common sense and the contact center ACD:

  • If you feel like you must use a virtual server, please don’t configure the virtual device to have more resources than the actual physical server. Just because it’s virtual doesn’t magically transform your 8GB physical server into three 32GB virtual devices.
  • Network latency is going to happen if you decide that routing calls from Manilla to Los Angeles to London to Manilla is a good idea. Just because it is VoIP does not mean that data all of sudden gets transmitted instantly, just like normal old internet traffic does not get transmitted instantly.
  • If your hosted platform gives you minimum and recommended specifications for your servers and you opt for the minimum, do not be surprised when certain services are not performing in a desired fashion. If you decide that an Asterisk server only needs the minimum requirements, which will handle X amount of calls, do not be shocked when X+1 calls will cause problems.
I would like to think that these are quite obvious, however, they appear not to be. We talked last week about how to avoid extinction for your contact center. Having common sense can go a long way in making sure that doesn’t happen.