I spoke at a seminar hosted by Interactive Intelligence like I have been doing more and more lately. Today I was in Detroit, MI, a city and state I have never been to. I was a huge fan of Ford and GM cars in my teens and at that time I had a good friend who used to be from this area. I used to hear lots of great stories about this city and the great cars that were created here.
Of course we have all been hearing stories about the turmoil at Ford, GM and Chrysler as of late and I knew the economy here isn't great. So I was very happy to see the conference was well-attended with lots of decision makers.
At lunch I had a chance to sit at a table with two people from CLECs and one company in the call center space.
It seems the people at the table didn't know I have a blog (is that possible??
)so as they spoke I tried to memorize everything they said so I could report it back to my readers.
The CLECs got into a lively discussion about MetaSwitch and the problems the company's earlier equipment had with Caller ID and fax support.
The conversation then went to Cisco and one of the CLECS was going off about Cisco's CallManager Express which he said was not worth the over 40 grand he paid for it. He seemed to want to junk it. The lack of SIP support and other missing features were the culprit here.
The conversation then went on to Juniper and Cisco's routing products which one CLEC said were both first rate, "You don't need to look elsewhere," was the exact quote
From there the person from the call center company started to talk about business he has lost to India. Apparently he works in the credit card business. He said that while every one of his agents has a video camera on them and the credit card processors can anonymously audit what is happening. In India there is little if any security.
In one center in India he said agents would learn of a customer who made a large purchase such as a computer and would write their contact information on their arm and then hide it under their sleeves.
The call center then outlawed long sleeves as a security measure. It seems a bunch of his business is coming back to the states now.
Altogether a great trip and I would have liked to stay longer as the networking was superb but instead I will have to wait 2 weeks and network at ITEXPO -- we are on track for 9,000 attendees and the list keeps growing by the minute. I keep checking it and am very excited to see how it has grown. I hope to see you all there.
Of course we have all been hearing stories about the turmoil at Ford, GM and Chrysler as of late and I knew the economy here isn't great. So I was very happy to see the conference was well-attended with lots of decision makers.
At lunch I had a chance to sit at a table with two people from CLECs and one company in the call center space.
It seems the people at the table didn't know I have a blog (is that possible??
)so as they spoke I tried to memorize everything they said so I could report it back to my readers.The CLECs got into a lively discussion about MetaSwitch and the problems the company's earlier equipment had with Caller ID and fax support.
The conversation then went to Cisco and one of the CLECS was going off about Cisco's CallManager Express which he said was not worth the over 40 grand he paid for it. He seemed to want to junk it. The lack of SIP support and other missing features were the culprit here.
The conversation then went on to Juniper and Cisco's routing products which one CLEC said were both first rate, "You don't need to look elsewhere," was the exact quote
From there the person from the call center company started to talk about business he has lost to India. Apparently he works in the credit card business. He said that while every one of his agents has a video camera on them and the credit card processors can anonymously audit what is happening. In India there is little if any security.
In one center in India he said agents would learn of a customer who made a large purchase such as a computer and would write their contact information on their arm and then hide it under their sleeves.
The call center then outlawed long sleeves as a security measure. It seems a bunch of his business is coming back to the states now.
Altogether a great trip and I would have liked to stay longer as the networking was superb but instead I will have to wait 2 weeks and network at ITEXPO -- we are on track for 9,000 attendees and the list keeps growing by the minute. I keep checking it and am very excited to see how it has grown. I hope to see you all there.
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