by Steven Fitzgerald, Chief Technical Officer, Consistacom
Management practices for call center telephone systems are stuck in the late 1980s. The current generation of administrators mostly doesn’t know anything but the old inefficient ways. The productivity of the 1990s bypassed phone system management and it costs every day.
VoIP has made it possible to consolidate many geographically-distributed systems into one. The flexibility and resilience this brings to call center design is immense and the economics are compelling. It is a new way of building networks but the amount of administration and configuration necessary to manage call flow programming, agents and stations is not diminished. In some ways it is actually more work because of increased coordination necessary when multiple administrators are working on the same system.
What I see over and over are doomed attempts to effectively manage new network design and technology with manual processes and tools that have not changed in twenty years. New ones are needed that can accept descriptions of functions and capabilities and implement low-level configuration changes automatically and quickly.
When your telecom staff requests money for a new consolidated network, insist on a plan for increasing effectiveness and personal productivity of administrators. Learn how simplification and automation pays for itself and can increase revenue. Make process re-engineering a part of the upgrade and follow through to make sure workers don’t fall back into old ways. It may help to make clear you expect a reduction in administrators to manage the new technology, and those that master the processes will get to run the network. Voice telecom shouldn’t be any different from the rest of IT.
Contact the author at tooltalk@consistacom.com.
© 2008 Telecom Reseller. All Rights Reserved.