Employment - CSI seeks experienced call center applications developers

We are actively seeking programmers to join our development team.

Positions are available for Application Developers.

Experience in call center and IP telephony is required.

These exciting positions are located in our corporate office in East Hartford, CT. Interested candidates can fill out our employment inquiry form.

The Ghost of Christmas Post

Just a corny play on words to end the christmas season and get back to work. We've added a nifty little news script in our sidebar that will bring you the latest call center news in real time. Check it out, and check back with us after the new year. If you've subscribed, you'll be notified when we write our next blog post.

In the meanwhile, let's start thinking about our New Years resolutions and goals for 2007. Remember, even Ebeneezer Scrooge was able to change for the better...

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Maverik leverages VoIP technology to build a world class call center

Customer service in the convenience store business isn't just about serving the people that walk in and buy a fountain soda or a gallon of gas -- indirectly, it's about servicing the managers and assistants who are running the stores. Keeping them operating at a high level will affect the direct customers. Maverik wanted to improve how they handled incoming service calls internally, from store to corporate.

What they had in the beginning was not quite a call center -- they had 4 people answering the phones, 4 computers, and 4 phone lines. Maverik then hired John Patterson to be the call center manager. Coming over from Continental Airlines, John had a distinct vision for how he could improve things. He knew the owners wanted to reach 300 stores in the next five years. He knew if he could build them a world class call center, he would be doing his part towards meeting that goal.

His first task was to leverage technology to bring his call center up to date in terms of the phone system. He upgraded to a new 3com VoIP phone system. He then visited another industry contact center to study how far ahead they were of where he wanted Maverik to be. He wanted to understand how they were using technology to differentiate themselves. He found that their quality monitoring and agent evaluation system seemed to allow them to fine tune agents' performance. John then contacted a former co-worker at Continental to get another opinion, and hopefully a referral, on a call recording and quality monitoring system.

The Continental contact told John to contact one of the largest quality monitoring system providers -- a company that had recently acquired a large workforce management company. He had left a message with them to contact him about call recording and quality monitoring for Maverik. After weeks had passed without a response, he decided to do some web searching for other vendors. He found a midsize company out of Connecticut named Coordinated Systems, Inc. (CSI) and he read their website. Their product, Virtual Observer (VO), seemed to match every requirement he was looking for. Easy to use, yet robust, compatible with his 3COM VoIP system, and a modular feature set so he wasn't forced to purchase every feature -- he could "start small and think big".

He had found his quality monitoring and call recording system. The sales process with CSI had been highly consultative in nature -- no traditional sales pressure, and John was very comfortable every step of the way. The price was affordable enough to capture every call. Approximately 2/3 of his calls are internal, from the Maverik stores themselves -- store personnel requiring support or help with timely matters. The other third of his calls are external -- from customers and card holders. Maverik's branding efforts include a popular "Adventure-themed" prepaid purchase card program. Now he would be able to lift the customer service performance levels to world class highs.....click here to read the entire story

Employment - CSI seeks call center solution sales professionals

We are actively seeking solution sales professionals to join our exciting sales team.

Positions are available for National Sales Account Representatives.

These exciting positions are located in our corporate office in East Hartford, CT. Experience in call center solution sales is preferred. Interested candidates can fill out our employment inquiry form.

CSI continues to deliver new, innovative QM features

Coordinated Systems, Inc. (CSI), of East Hartford, CT, is pleased to announce a series of functional enhancements to the latest release of Virtual Observer (VO) 3.0, a complete call center quality monitoring and call recording solution. Many of the enhancements are included with the base solution and will be deployed to the current customer base over the next few months. Other value added enhancements are available as add-on modules at a nominal cost for customers with active support agreements.

The most anticipated and exciting addition to the VO line up is “VO Live” – “VO Live” gives supervisors and managers a toolset to reach out and interact with agents on the fly and control agent desktops. “VO Live” includes three distinctive features: VO Live Desktop, VO Live Chat and VO Live Panel.

“VO Live Desktop” allows you to pop open an agents desktop on your screen to view or interact with them.

“VO Live Chat” allows instant messaging between you and your agents for textual conversation. Managers now can chat with an agent in real time and provide an agent with real time strategic consulting as they assist a caller.

“VO Live Panel” is a powerful tool that allows supervisors to view thumbnails of multiple agent desktops on one screen, and with a click they can view a full screen size of any thumbnail.

Upcoming Call Center Trade Shows

ICCM - www.callcenterdemo.com
February, 21-23, 2007
Miami, FL

ICCM - www.callcenterdemo.com
May 21-23, 2007
Dallas, TX

Call Center Summit
Jan. 22-25, 2007
Atlanta, GA

Will you be attending these call center industry trade shows?

Call Center Trade Magazines

I use this great new feature in Internet Explorer 7's tabbed browsing (of course Firefox did it first) - it allows you to store groups of bookmarks that you can open up all at once. For example, once such group I use is called "Call Center Trade Rags". This brings up my favorite news sources for the call center industry:

- Contact Professional

- Contact Center World

- CRM2DAY

- CrmXchange

- TMCnet

- Call Center Magazine

My Bad Customer Behavior with Amazon.com

This post is just a simple note wishing everyone a safe and happy holidays. The holidays are often a time of heightened stress, and we need to remember we're all on the same team.

Next time you're calling up Amazon.com support, remember that the customer service rep is there to help you. Often times if you start off the conversation with an attitude, it will put them in an uneasy situation where they may not be able to help you as best they can.

I know this to be true because I was very mad at Amazon for charging me for shipping, given that their website said "free shipping for orders over $25". That was pretty clear, I thought.

What the rep pointed out to me was that my items were coming from 3 different sources. My items from Amazon only accounted for about $ 18. The fine print was missed. I hung up the phone, embarrassed at the hard time I had given the rep. Amazon's website still should be made more clear. Also, I had to delete and redo my order three times because my bank card had expired. Again, my own operator error.

Still, it's frustrating. Amazon rep, I am truly sorry for sharing my frustration with you.