TORONTO, September 2, 2010 — Telax Hosted Call Center today introduced new VP of Channel Sam Sharkawy. Mr. Sharkawy, who began work in his role in late July 2010, is responsible for developing new sales channels for Telax Hosted Call Center solutions with a focus on carrier sales.

“Not only does Sam bring a career’s worth of experience in telecom to the table, he also brings a deep knowledge of the carrier environment, particularly in the case of Metaswitch,” said Mario Perez, President and founder of Telax Hosted Call Center. Sharkawy worked at Metaswtich for 4 years, first as a sales engineer and later as Inside Sales Manager. Perez further commented, “We are in an intense growth stage and are very happy to have Sam on board to drive that growth within new channels.”

Mr. Sharkawy is an engineer and holds a Master’s degree in Engineering from Queen’s University. He is also a member of the Professional Engineers of Ontario. Prior to leading inside sales for Metaswitch, he worked as a Sales Engineer for Tekelec and Lucent Technologies and also spent a number of years with IBM Network Services.

“My main motivation for joining Telax was the people. I’ve known the VP Operations, Taras Kapanaiko, for some time and he’s incredibly customer focussed. This is a great team,” explained Sharkawy about his recent move to Telax. “The other motivating factor was technology that we have here at Telax. Cloud computing is becoming a major part of the ecosystem for telecom and information services and I look forward to being part of that change.”

One of Sam’s first challenges will be to spearhead Telax’s presence at the upcoming Metaswitch Forum. In addition to being a telecom sales specialist, Sam also plays a mean blues guitar. As part of the Telax Hosted Call Center team, he lives and works in Toronto, Ontario.

About Telax Hosted Call Center:

Telax Hosted Call Center is North America’s leader in hosted call center solutions. Based in Toronto, Canada, Telax has been providing cloud-based business solutions to prominent public and private sector organizations since 1999. The simplicity delivered by Telax services enables clients like Northrop Grumman, Industry Canada, the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying, CI Investments, Globalive Communications, Health Canada and the GSA, to reduce costs and improve efficiency, so that they can do more with their most critical resource: people. For more information, visit http://www.telax.com. For the latest Telax news, visit http://www.telax.com/category/news.

Google is a prime example of a company driven by intellectual capital. As of 2010, Google employed 20,621 people in dozens of countries across the globe. Employees are the core of the business: they development platforms, monetize them, market them, monitor billing and ensure compliance with relevant legislation. What is Google if not its employees?

Companies like Google, driven by knowledge workers rather than traditional means of production, face a host of challenges that widget-makers never experienced. One of those challenges is management, at a very basic level. As the saying goes, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. How do you measure a human being?

Consider this hypothetical. Company A has 30 employees working on 3 projects in addition ongoing tasks. The first is of utmost importance, because could lead to account. The second is non-urgent development work for an existing client. The third is a rebuild of the company’s website, another low-priority item. Management eventually assesses that the team is falling behind on the first urgent project and requests that developers do costly overtime in order to meet the deadline. The company risks losing the major new account and ends up losing money on the development project because the cost of the overtime.

Meanwhile, 42% of the company’s employee hours over the past few weeks have been dedicated to the non-urgent second project and 27% to the non-urgent website rebuild. Information that management didn’t have access to at the time. If they had known how the employee hours were trending during such a crucial time, they would surely have made different decisions. But despite reports from project managers and team leaders, Company A’s decision-makers didn’t have clear visibility into the distribution of its most essential resources: people.

The business community is only beginning to realize the necessity of workforce analytics (a term that still means different things to different people). What does it mean to Telax? Our vision of workforce analytics is, at its core, one of data aggregation. Earlier, we asked the question, “How do you measure a human being?” For the purposes of workforce analytics, the answer is: you break down a person’s working time into chunks of data than you can then manipulate, aggregate and dashboard. As for the technology that makes such a breakdown possible, we’ve got you covered.

It’s important to remember that workforce analytics is not some Orwellian attempt at implementing absolute employee surveillance. On the contrary, it is an approach to management that should ultimately reduce employee frustration, workplace friction and increase efficiency. The data generated by this type of technology isn’t useful on an individual level, but on a collective one.

Traditionally, people are measured on results or output. But for proactive management, you need to be ahead of the curve. Your employee may be doing a great job at rebuilding a website, but they are not being effective in meeting the company’s goals if they should be working something else. Peter Drucker, in his book The Effective Executive, states that “there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

Had Company A from our hypothetical been working with a workforce analytics solution, it could have avoided costly mistakes in resource distribution. Is your business vulnerable to the same error? Get in touch with us to learn more.

Videoconferencing has already had a major impact on the banking industry: banks have leveraged the technology to build protifable and efficient relationships with new customers, all from the comfort of head office. The legal and media relations industries have also benefited widely from cost savings achieved through video. What will this mean for your industry?

Why all the questions? Well, we’ll be releasing video soon (subscribe to our RSS feed to stay tuned) and we want to know how feel about it. Check out these quick polls and feel free to leave a comment. We’d love to hear from you!

The book’s authors (Real Bergevin, Afshan Kinder, Winston Siegel and Bruce Simpson), in their infinite wisdom, chose to consult a number of leaders in the call center industry and Telax Hosted Call Center was among them.

Call Center for Dummies, 2nd Edition

The book aims to provide a “fast and easy way to improve call center management and response.” Coincidentally, Telax Hosted Call Center is a fast and easy way to improve call center management and response. Read one of our case studies or check out a demo. Anyway, if you’re wondering what we contributed to the publication, remember that copies are available online and in major bookstores.

Hint: Our bit comes after page 200.

Happy reading!

TORONTO, June 15, 2010 – Telax Hosted Call Center, North America’s leader in hosted call center solutions, today announced their partnership with ecobee. ecobee is an award-winning green technology company that provides energy management solutions for both residential and light commercial applications. ecobee chose the Telax solution to help manage their industry-leading customer service. Located in the heart of downtown Toronto, ecobee will rely on the solution to maintain its customer service levels during the upcoming G20 summit, which promises to be highly disruptive to local businesses.

“We are committed to providing our customers with exceptional support at all times,” explained Stuart Lombard, President & CEO, ecobee. “We’re committed not only to maintaining industry-leading service standards, but also to choosing greenest ways to run our business. Using a Telax solution for our customer service team allows us to achieve both.”

“ecobee does highly innovative work in an important sector, we’re very excited to be working with them,” said Telax President and founder Mario Perez. “The timing is great too: many businesses aren’t nearly as prepared as ecobee to maintain service levels during this disruptive period.” Telax Hosted Call Center delivers a similar solution to a host of large public sector groups including the GSA and Health Canada.

Businesses located in downtown Toronto are already feeling the impact of the upcoming G-20 Summit as construction continues on a massive security fence, resulting in road closures and heavy traffic. Mayor David Miller, in a statement earlier this month, urged Toronto residents to avoid downtown during the Summit which runs from June 25th to 27th.

About ecobee:

ecobee, founded in 2007, delivers intelligent conservation solutions for real people. The company is building its product platform around The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System™. ecobee’s products are sold for use in single family homes (new and retrofitted), multi-family dwellings and light commercial properties. For more information, visit http://www.ecobee.com.

Contact: Jessica Dolmer, jessica@ecobee.com, +1 416.987.1024

About Telax Hosted Call Center:

Telax Hosted Call Center is North America’s leader in hosted call center solutions. Based in Toronto, Canada, Telax has been providing cloud-based business solutions to prominent public and private sector organizations since 1999. The simplicity delivered by Telax services enables clients like Northrop Grumman, Burberry, CI Investments, Globalive Communications, Health Canada and the GSA, to reduce costs and improve efficiency, so that they can do more with their most critical resource: people. For more information, visit www.telax.com. For the latest Telax news, visit www.telax.com/category/news.

Contact: Koray Parmaks, koray@telax.com, +1 647.277.1020

As we mentioned in a recent press release, Telax founder and President Mario Perez recently had the honour of meeting with the Right Honourable Stephen Harper. Mario was invited to the meeting as a winner of the 10 Most Influential Hispanic Canadian Awards, a distinction presented by the Candian Hispanic Business Association (CHBA) with the support of Scotiabank, FOCAL and the Canadian Council for the Americas.

Stephen Harper shakes hands with Hispanic business leader and Telax President Mario Perez

Mario’s thoughts on the experience? “It was great to the meet the Prime Minister, and more importantly it was great to see the Hispanic business community being recognized by our government,” explained Mario. “But now, it’s back to work. We need to keep innovating to maintain the wonderful reputation that we’ve achieved.”

Speaking of innovation, we should get back to work. Stay tuned for news about the launch of new Telax Hosted Center functionality - coming soon!

OTTAWA, May 27, 2010 – Telax founder and President Mario Perez, along with other past winners of the 10 Most Influential Hispanic Canadian Awards, will attend a private meeting today in Ottawa with Prime Minister Stephen Harper. According to Mauricio Opsina, Director of the Canadian Hispanic Business Association, this is the first time that a formal national delegation of influential Hispanic Canadians meets with the Prime Minister.

“I’m honoured to meet Prime Minister Harper. This is a wonderful opportunity for the Hispanic business community in Canada and for me personally,” shared Mario Perez. The delegation will also meet with Mexican President Felipe Calderón prior to being featured at a luncheon and evening reception hosted by the Canadian Foundation for the Americas (FOCAL) and attended by a number of Ambassadors, Members of Parliament and media.

The 10 Most Influential Hispanic Canadians Award Program is organized by the Candian Hispanic Business Association (CHBA) with the support of Scotiabank, FOCAL and the Canadian Council for the Americas. For more information on the CHBA or the Award Program, visit www.HispanicBusiness.ca.

About Telax Hosted Call Center:

Telax Hosted Call Center is North America’s leader in hosted call center solutions. Based in Toronto, Canada, Telax has been providing cloud-based business solutions to prominent public and private sector organizations since 1999. The simplicity delivered by Telax services enables clients like Northrop Grumman, Industry Canada, the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying, CI Investments, Globalive Communications, Health Canada and the GSA, to reduce costs and improve efficiency, so that they can do more with their most critical resource: people. For more information, visit www.telax.com. For the latest Telax news, visit http://www.telax.com/category/news.

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For more information or to arrange an interview, please contact:

Koray Parmaks
+1-647-277-1020
koray@telax.com

Wings of the Gaylord Opryland Resort stand in one-story-deep floodwaters Monday. Photo courtesy of USA Today.

The moral of the story? Disasters happen. The best weapon is a good contingency plan.

Many of our customers use our solution to deploy remote working strategies so that employees continue life as usual during natural disasters or public health crises. In fact, one of our customers chose to deploy a remote strategy during the SARS crisis in Toronto and never went back.

In short: Make sure you have a business contuinity strategy. Disasters happen.

As for Metaswitch Forum 2010, it’s not going to be rescheduled for a couple of months according to the latest updates from Metaswitch. But we’ll keep you posted.

TORONTO, May 12, 2010 — Open & Save today announced the implementation of a Telax Hosted Call Center solution at its busy corporate headquarters in Scarborough, Ontario, home to over 160 employees. The cloud-based call center solution will assist the direct mail giant in more efficiently tracking its inbound call volume, managing its national sales team and improving business intelligence.

“The reports that I can generate with Telax Hosted Call Center are invaluable. They give me a great deal of visibility into the response rates of my campaigns,” explained Open & Save Marketing Director Andrew Boone. Mr. Boone added, “The solution is also a great tool for distributing inbound leads and managing our national sales team.” In addition to comprehensive reporting, Open & Save also benefits from the automatic recording of all its calls.

“We are very excited to implement this non-traditional solution for Open & Save. They are a forward-thinking company that truly understands the value our platform will bring,” commented Mario Perez, Telax founder and President. “Because our technology fills an important need while remaining very affordable, we’re seeing more and more adoption by businesses outside the call center industry.”

About Open & Save:

Based in Toronto, Open & Save is Canada’s largest national co-op direct mail provider, frequently distributing to 98% of Canadian households. For over 28 years Open & Save has helped small and medium-sized business achieve growth and success by designing, printing and distributing low-cost direct mail pieces. With a dedicated team of more than 160 employees, Open & Save is a 100% Canadian owned and operated. For more information on how Open & Save can help you grow your business, visit www.openandsave.com.

About Telax Hosted Call Center:

Telax Hosted Call Center is North America’s leader in hosted call center solutions. Based in Toronto, Canada, Telax has been providing cloud-based business solutions to prominent public and private sector organizations since 1999. The simplicity delivered by Telax services enables clients like Northrop Grumman, Burberry, CI Investments, Globalive Communications, Health Canada and the GSA, to reduce costs and improve efficiency, so that they can do more with their most critical resource: people. For more information, visit Telax on the web at www.telax.com. For the latest Telax news, visit www.telax.com/category/news.

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Contact:

Koray Parmaks
+1 647.277.1020
koray@telax.com

To print, download or send this press release to a colleague, visit the PRWeb version: http://www.prweb.com/releases/open-and-save/hosted-call-center/prweb3906614.htm