We’ve been working on some new presence functionality in our Call Center Agent application and we’re happy to report that we have now launched these latest features.

We’ve always provided an ergonomic phone book, where thousands of entries could be searched with minimum keystrokes. We’ve continually focused  on reducing RSIs (repetitive strain injuries) while enabling fast access to essential information for the most efficient call routing.

Now, Telax has taken to the next level by providing real-time presence information for other users logged into the system.  No more dialing an agent that is not avaiable, and waiting for the system to prevent the call out, or provide with appropriate message.

With this new functionality, users can now proactively determine who is the resource available to leverage, instead of dialing around.  Agents are sorted by teams with fast search enabled to find specific individuals in a list. The presence window, only a click away from the directory, remembers your last request, so if on the “Logged Agents” was the last group selected, it will be the default for your query.  One click dialing or transfer engage after easily finding the most suitable agent for your needs.

To enable your Telax Hosted Call Center solution with presence support please contact your account manager or request a free demo now.

Your IVR is your customer’s first point of contact. It’s the step in the customer experience that sets the tone for the entire interaction. When you make a good impression, accomplish a conversion or lose a customer altogether, your IVR was a factor. So to help you build a killer IVR that will leave you customers and your customer service staff smiling, we’ve compiled 4 essential tips:

1. Let the customer drive your IVR design. Put the options that’ll be most selected first. If you get twice as many calls for sales than you do for technical support, your menu should reflect that. “For sales, press 1, for technical support, press 2.”
2. Respect your customer’s time. Your customers have got better things to do than navigate through your IVR. Do everything you can to make the IVR interaction short and efficient. Indicate to the customer how many options will be available in a menu. “Please select one of the following three options.” Give your callers an easy way to return to the previous menu or to speak to a real agent.
3. Make your customers feel at home. Use language that’s comfortable for your primary demographic and keep it consistent. Employ the same professional voice talent for all of your prompts and ensure that an appropriate tone is used.
4. Leverage available technology. Take advantage of CTI technology to improve the customer experience: look at implementing advanced functionality like virtual queuing and smart call routing.

We’re all somebody’s customer and simply put, life is too short for crappy IVRs. If you’d like to find out more about keeping your customers and staff happy, get a free demo of what Telax can do for you.

Pyjamas: Some work-from-homers are sticklers for a regular work routine, including business casual, even when sticking close to home. I, however, am of the school that believes, “Thou shalt have pyjamas.” I work better in flannel: it’s a fact of nature. Everybody’s different and it’s hard to accommodate those differences with a corporate dress code. Having the ability to wear whatever my little heart desires allows me to focus less on the runs in my pantyhose and more on what’s important: my work.

Savings: It’s truly incredible the money (and time) you can save by avoiding transit to and from work, a coffee here and there, a food court lunch. In the context of my spending habits, working from home is equivalent to about $65 a week or $3250 a year in savings, plus the time saved in interminable commutes which I won’t even begin to calculate. It’s practically like getting a raise (which is not to say I wouldn’t still accept a real one…).

Pets: Speaking on behalf of my two cats and two rats (yes, rats), working from home is really the best. They’re happier, I’m happier. There are tons of studies that say that animal companionship helps regulate mood and is good for general health. Those studies may not have dealt specifically with rats, but I’m sure they would have, had they realized how cool rats are. For people who don’t have pets, the same principles apply to plants. A very scientific study (conducted by yours truly) concluded that plants tend to die less in the care of work-from-homers, with the exception of cacti, which seem to die more, from overwatering.

Solitude: I don’t remember the last time I was able to sit quietly and reflect at the office. “Kate, can I ask you a question?” (Internal dialogue: That WAS a question.) Happens all the time. But when I’m working from home, I can take fifteen minutes to truly dedicate my grey matter to a particular strategy or report. Some of my best work happens in solitude. As one my favourite Telaxers likes to say, “No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.” I can’t give him full credit: it’s Voltaire. We’re cool like that.

Flexibility: I couldn’t possibly list the pleasures of working from home without touching on one of the most appreciated of them all: flexibility. Particularly for people with kids, the flexibility of working from home is an amazing gift. Of course there are still deadlines, meetings and expectations of availability that must be met. But if you have to run out for an errand or an appointment, the time is easily made up in the early morning or late afternoon from the comfort of the home office. It’s magical and a MAJOR perk, not to mention the fact that cloud-based solutions like Telax Hosted Call Center allow you to access that kind of flexibility from anywhere with an Internet connection and a telephone. Working holiday, anyone?

I could go on a great deal longer about the benefits of working from home, but the rats are dying for celery snack and I’ve got an appointment with some sustained thinking. Telax remote worker, over and out.

CDC Director Richard Besser, MD confirmed at a recent H1N1 swine flu briefing that “What has been seen with previous outbreaks is flu goes away in the summer. But during the winter flu spreads better, so the virus could go away and come back.” He added that “this period before fall is critically important for community preparedness should [the] virus come back in severe form.”

And that’s not all. A recent article in the Globe and Mail highlighted that “many provinces have passed updated health acts in recent years” giving them the power to take whatever steps necessary to curb a pandemic. That could go so far as to include quarantining schools, day cares and other centers where people gather, like offices.

Public health issues are a relatively new problem for businesses. Few managers have ever had to consider the impact of widespread school closures on employees with children, or worst-case scenarios like wholesale office quarantines. Emergency preparedness doesn’t have to be costly or complicated, but it needs to be addressed.

Pre-empt issues by having a plan and the supporting technologies required to implement it. Because flu viruses are transmitted by close contact, make sure that large offices aren’t as vulnerable to shut down by breaking them into smaller groups. Look at work-from-home strategies for your key teams or call center operators.

Applications like Telax Hosted Call Center offer functionality that ensures productivity isn’t affected by distributed workers. In fact, one of our customers decided to use satellite offices and remote workers during the 2003 SARS crisis and never went back.

In an age where the technology is available to avoid service interruptions, customers will not tolerate a of lack preparedness from their key providers. A lesson some businesses unfortunately have to learn the hard way.

For more information on how Telax Hosted Call Center achieves business continuity for its private and public sector customers across North America, contact us.

Mario Perez at his home office in Toronto, Ontario

It was after developing a call center solution from scratch for Yak that it became clear to Mario that in order for his business to evolve, a product was needed. Late in 2003, a new company was created: Telax Voice Solutions Inc.

“Our customers all said that the idea was great, as long as it worked. But the system was slow, almost every day when we first started. Some of those customers have stayed with us to this day, but that wasn’t because of the product, it was because of the customer service. Our customers knew that if there was a problem, big or small, we were doing everything we could to fix it. The lines of communication were always open.”

That customer service strategy, based on communication and openness, has served Telax well over the years. After securing an increasing number of modest call center contracts, Telax was eventually selected as the solution provider for every Canadian government RFP publically posted in 2007 including a 100-seat contract covering eight offices of the Ontario Worker’s Compensation Board, or WSIB. “It was a different company after that,” recounts Perez. “As a company, we weren’t a child anymore. It was a growth stage: the teenage years.”

Telax’s customer base has since grown to include Health Canada, Industry Canada, the U.S. General Services Administration, CI Financial, Burberry and numerous other public and private sector clients. And the Telax team has grown to keep pace. “We’re a very tight knit group,” explains Mario. “Sure, everyone wears a different hat, but when it comes down to it, everyone is there to support. If any of our clients need assistance, everybody gets on the phone. I hesitate to define roles too much because it’s such a cooperative atmosphere.”

As for Mario’s decision to stay in Canada, “I couldn’t be happier. I remember in the early years, when I first arrived, I joined the Sierra Club to do outdoor activities and meet people. They asked me if I’d been camping before and I told them no, that I had never been past of Highway 7, the road that’s more or less the north border of Toronto. That became the joke of the group. Are we exploring north of Highway 7 today? I learned a lot about Canadian idiosyncrasies with those guys. Respect for wildlife, respect for nature. There is a very rich culture here. I am very glad to be part of it.”

Start by reading Part 1 of this interview.

Mario Perez spent his first month in Canada sleeping at the Salvation Army, practicing his English and picking up odd jobs. He eventually landed what he jokes was his first job in his field: recycling old IBM computers. Shortly thereafter came a job as a software developer with ITS.

He chuckles as he recalls the interview process, “They had somebody come in from a switching company because they didn’t have the knowledge internally to conduct the interviews. I remember thinking that I knew ten times more software than the guy they brought in, but my English wasn’t good enough at the time to explain that. Eventually those language barriers came down. That interviewer is my friend to this day.”

After ITS came Minacs, where Mario lead a number of projects including the implementation of IVRs for the American Embassy in Ottawa. It was while undergoing a routine health exam required for a U.S. visa that Mario was diagnosed with lymphoma. “It was funny, you know, because I was so healthy. I was swimming ten kilometres a week and going to the gym nearly every day. I was lucky to have been diagnosed early, but I still had to have chemo. It was a very difficult time in my life.”

It was while he was undergoing chemotherapy that Mario decided he would start his own company. “I didn’t start Telax because I was unhappy at Minacs. Minacs was very supportive. I was never removed as team leader on my projects, they just beefed up the team to compensate for the work I couldn’t do. I knew I wanted to have my own company and once I was diagnosed I just knew that I couldn’t wait 10 or 20 years.” And thus, in 1997, was born Telax Systems Inc.

To be continued…

Mario Perez is in many ways exactly what you’d expect of a successful entrepreneur: he’s friendly, funny, intelligent and to-the-point. Like most, he worked hard to get where he is. But upon closer inspection, the path Mario Perez has travelled is far from ordinary: from teaching at the University of Havana to living at the Salvation Army, the founder of Telax is a man of many stories.

Mario Perez was born and raised in Santiago de Cuba, a city of half a million in the south-eastern part of Cuba. When asked how his interest in programming was sparked, he points out that his mother was a math teacher and that that probably had a lot to do with it. Armed with a solid math background and an interest in technology, Mario entered the electronics program at the University of Oriente when he was eighteen.

Reminiscing, he recounts how a teacher at U of O took him under his wing and challenged him with an impossible project: the translation of a huge piece of code from the obscure programming language Leal to the more mainstream Fortran. He never did complete the project, but his work on it advanced him beyond the level of his fellow students and in his second year, he began teaching first-year classes.

He went on to teach at the University of Havana after graduation. When I asked Mario what entrenched his love for computer science, his answer is unequivocal: teaching. “When you teach, you must learn,” he explained. “You have to stay ahead of the curve. I think that my experience in teaching is what has enabled to me to look beyond what’s already been done and see possibility.”

In addition to teaching, Mario worked for a UNESCO-funded organization after his graduation. “We had access to some of the best technology available. That’s the main reason I worked there, for the toys. It was Cuba in the mid-80s we were doing things like 3D modelling.” As it turned out, it was the 3D modelling project for a Cuban industrial design firm that eventually landed him in Canada, where he was sent to purchase JVC equipment. He didn’t board his return flight to Cuba. “It was complicated. There were a lot of politics,” Mario explains quietly.

To be continued…

Richard Wagg

Telax sat down with Richard Wagg, contact center strategist par excellence, to get his thoughts on the move from traditional call center mindsets to cloud-based solutions. This is part two of that meeting.

Is customer experience impacted by the transition from a premise-based solution to a cloud-based one?

Sure. For one thing, if companies are lowering their costs, those savings will often be passed on to the consumer.

In terms of the customer service experience, the call center solution should be invisible to the customer. If you have a premise-based solution and you go down, clients will notice. If you’re not able to provide the client with what they need, that generates a log of negative energy.

I volunteer doing sound for the band at my church and if people notice anything at all about the sound, I’m not doing my job. It’s the same thing with a call center solution: from a client perspective, they shouldn’t really notice anything.

Now, there certain conveniences that clients do pick up on. I’ve worked with a company that had the option to request a call back when wait times were high, which is great. That’s a type of technology that the client notices and appreciates. You can wash the car, do the dishes, whatever. You’re not stuck waiting in queue.

Do you think that access to cloud-based call center solutions will affect the rate of off-shoring?

It could potentially affect the rate of off-shoring. If a company wants to setup a call center abroad, a hosted solution is by far the one that makes the most sense. The real question is: does off-shoring make sense from a business perspective? The answer depends on the business. Do you have the right education and skill levels available? Are there tax incentives? Are you going to see a reaction from the customer base? If using cloud-based solutions and off-shoring saves you money, then maybe it makes sense to do it. You have to consider the big picture.

What do you see as the future of call centers and customer service?

The call center is no longer exclusively a cost center. We have to ask ourselves what additional value customer service centers can bring. Social networks are popping up all over the place; customers have an accessible platform to share good experiences or bad ones. We need to be listening.

Social networking is a reality, which it makes it all the more important to make sure that the client is satisfied with the service. Like preventing a customer from zero-ing out of an IVR, for instance.  Well, if your clients are happy with that, fine. But if they’re not, it’s hard to get those clients back once they decide to leave you. You have to consider customer reaction very carefully when creating contact center policy.

Social networks are also making a lot more information available, allowing us to make better business decisions. I think people are going to start using the call center more as a resource or tool rather than just a cost center. Drill the data you have and analyze it. How many better business decisions can be made differently based on that analysis?

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Richard Wagg is a Toronto-based contact center strategist who has spent the past 14 years supporting contact center operations and technologies in the financial services sector. He has worked extensively with big banks and mutual fund companies to improve efficiency by implementing new contact center platforms. More recently, Richard has focussed on technologies as they relate to contact center business models.  He strives daily to push contact centre towards a much more open, cost effective and dynamic environment than was previously thought possible.

Telax sat down with Richard Wagg, contact center strategist par excellence, to get his thoughts on the move from traditional call center mindsets to cloud-based solutions. Here is part one of that very interesting meeting.

What do you consider a traditional call center mindset?

Traditionally, call center thinking has been very linear. The call comes in, you transfer it to a warm body using standard ACD queues and basic IVRs. There was some progress in the 90s: companies began to take a smarter approach to call routing. But there is still a lot of traditional thinking in place. The inbound call center is historically little more than a cost center and many companies have not moved away from that way of thinking.

Is the move from traditional call centers to cloud-based solutions inevitable?

Yes, I think the trend is going that way. I’ve worked with companies that had a traditional call center and the challenge was that the company was not willing to invest the capital required to keep the solution current. It’s not cheap to have the right solutions.

I like to think of it in terms of core competencies.  You look at a company like Telax, for instance, and their core competency is call center solutions, pure and simple.  For a company that’s producing license plates or selling mutual funds, does it make sense to invest in in-house call center expertise? Training is incredibly time consuming and expensive. It comes down to a business decision. Companies are apt to migrate because the hosted solutions available are getting better and better and reproducing comparable solutions in-house is becoming increasingly expensive.

What are the major challenges of migrating from a traditional to a cloud-based solution?

I think that the biggest challenge is making the decision itself. Some companies have invested significantly in PBX technology or other in-house infrastructure. There is a hesitation to go down the hosted path because of a pressure to get your money’s worth out of past decisions. A stakeholder involved in the decision may have gone to senior management and justified a major expense several years ago. In some cases, people don’t want to ask the tough questions. The business decision is definitely the most difficult part because it often requires admitting error.

Is it possible for companies to do a partial migration to a hosted solution?

Yes, although customization can be very costly. There are a number of components to a call center. If you invested significantly in a PBX and an in-house call recording solution, you may not need to outsource those elements. But every time you want to integrate a hosted piece with an in-house piece, more customization is going to be required.

I remember a situation where we had an IVR application that was done through a CTI app. At the time, we didn’t want in-house changes, we wanted to outsource them. We needed to make a change in an IVR menu, something very simple, and the cost was over $50,000. Now that’s an extreme example, but the point is that customization can be prohibitively costly. Needless to say, we didn’t move forward.

With a company like Telax, they’ll often reuse elements of development requested by their clients.  So you’re likely not shouldering the entire cost alone, it’s being shared among numerous organizations. There are also licensing costs to consider. Does it make sense in the long run to keep some elements in-house? Not in my opinion. But there may be a business case for making a slower transition to a hosted solution.

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Richard Wagg is a Toronto-based contact center strategist who has spent the past 14 years supporting contact center operations and technologies in the financial services sector. He has worked extensively with big banks and mutual fund companies to improve efficiency by implementing new contact center platforms. More recently, Richard has focussed on technologies as they relate to contact center business models.  He strives daily to push contact centre towards a much more open, cost effective and dynamic environment than was previously thought possible.

The world has experienced a lot of firsts with the Obama administration, most notably the election of the first African American President. But there are numerous other firsts, particularly when it comes to technology.

Obama is the first sitting president to use a smartphone and rely on email to get things done. He’s also the first to explore cloud computing as a means of increasing efficiency and cost savings across government agencies. This is particularly clear when you look at the profile of his Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra.

Prior to his nomination to the post of CIO, Kundra was most well-known for introducing Google Apps to Washington, D.C.as the city’s CTO. In an interview with InformationWeek on June 17, 2009, Kundra talked about introducing cloud-based tools such “blogs, video and lightweight workflow programs or public participation programs” across government agencies, stressing his support for “open architecture.”

$33 million was set aside for cloud computing projects in the President’s 2010 budget request. Kundra indicated that “as we get closer to October, projects plans and specific funding … will be determined.”

Interest in cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) is skyrocketing in government because of its potential to help solve some of the challenges faced by the current administration. If implemented correctly, cloud computing pilot projects can create jobs and reduce energy consumption, not to mention increasing efficiency and promote cost savings.

An example of a cloud computing application that can be leveraged by government agencies to achieve these goals is hosted contact center technology. The SaaS model, by reducing cost and complexity deployments, enables existing deployments to save money and increase flexibility. More useful still is the fact that this technology can now be deployed in non-traditional call center spaces.

When we refer to “non-traditional” call center spaces, we’re talking about informal or hidden work groups that do not recognize themselves as “call centers,” but can benefit from the same technology. For example constituency services, helpdesks, mobile, remote and work-at-home teams to name a few.

A huge component of government resources are dedicated to delivering services to people. The private sector, driven by an extremely competitive market, has been able to achieve impressive efficiency in traditional and non-traditional call center spaces. And although the public sector faces some different challenges, working with Industry Canada, Health Canada, Natural Resources Canada and the U.S. GSA among others has allowed us to witness a trend towards innovation and cloud technologies in public sector service delivery.

If Kundra and the Obama administration more broadly are going to be successful in leveraging cloud computing to achieve efficiencies and cost savings across government agencies, adoption of new technologies like hosted contact center technology in both traditional and non-traditional call center spaces is going to be key.