Call Center Wallboards, DC-Baltimore Ethernet, KnoahSoft's Harmony Suite, Out-Twittering Twitter

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David Sims
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Call Center Wallboards, DC-Baltimore Ethernet, KnoahSoft's Harmony Suite, Out-Twittering Twitter

A recent article in the Baltimore Sun highlighted the growth from the perspective of Georgia-based metro Ethernet provider FiberLight, which late last year promised to unveil a network “that can connect commercial customers in downtown Baltimore and several southern suburbs to points in Washington and Northern Virginia."

It’s "a huge, growing market for us," said Judd Carothers, the company's executive vice president of network operations, engineering and construction.

At the time of the announcement last November, FiberLight officials also said they would spend $20 million to build the network, slated to run 104 miles “from downtown and western parts of Baltimore south through Columbia, Laurel and Greenbelt, where it ties into the company's existing Washington and Northern Virginia telecommunication networks.”

Last month, TMCnet reported that the company completed a new 3.5 mile, 432-count underground network through Miami's Financial District.

Read more here.

Wallboards. Don’t think about them much, do you? Maybe that’s why you most likely don’t have the one your call center really needs.

Start with LED wallboards. According to a good overview from Call Center Wallboards, displaying key call center statistics and metrics on wallboards is a good way to improve agent and team leader performance.

Why is this so? Because wallboards show the groups what is happening right now in the call center in a reliable and efficient way, according to vendor Spectrum Corp., which sells wallboards with a life expectancy that exceeds 10 years.

Company officials run down some of the benefits of wallboards -- they come in multiple sizes to meet any call center space or use requirements and budget, tricolor LED’s are useful to support threshold and variance alerts, messages can be run on the boards, audible alerts get the attention of the agent and request them to view the wallboards and they can be IP-enabled to connect to the corporate network and avoid costly separate wiring.

Read more here.

KnoahSoft, a vendor in the contact center industry, is offering a nice feature on their Harmony suite product -- real-time, web-based silent monitoring with screen capture that gives authorized users permission to listen to agent calls as they happen.

Calling it “Silent Monitoring with Screen Capture,” it’s a godsend for supervisors who want to pinpoint any agent trouble spots to take care of customer satisfaction in real time. The feature gives them the ability to stay “involved and in control” with agent interaction from anywhere in the world, which is pretty much what any supervisor would want.

The way KnoahSoft officers explain it, users can listen to live calls in progress via a dynamic web-based interface from anywhere in the world, bring up a real time view of agent information and call status and use it for live monitoring of calls, “with or without screen capture.”

As far as the screen capture feature goes, it’s engineered to let users enhance real time performance assessment capabilities by seeing what the agent sees and what tools they are using to provide services, company officials explain, adding that it also lets users conduct Q & A during live monitoring, deliver real-time feedback and “enhanc training and coaching programs.”

Read more here.

Those of us who found no real use for Twitter might have another fad to ignore soon. According to CNN, UberMedia, “which owns several popular applications that interface with Twitter, is outlining plans to build a social network that could compete with that popular microblogging platform, said three people who were briefed on the plans.”

Evidently they see their opportunity in Twitter’s message length restrictions and the fact that it’s apparently “confusing” to newbies. Friends, if you can’t figure out Twitter, social media may not be for you.

UberMedia certainly has the experience and the chops, they own UberSocial, Echofon and Twidroyd, apps that “connect to Twitter and offer features beyond Twitter's own software,” as CNN says.

“Twitter competitors such as FriendFeed or Google Buzz have failed to catch on with mainstream users -- although some, like Tumblr, are growing,” CNN reports. Studies also show that relatively few of Twitter’s 200 million accounts are actually used on any regular basis.

Technolog reported recently that “Our source's API data shows that there are 56 million accounts on Twitter following 8 or more accounts. There are only 38 million following 16, and just 12 million following 64.” Compare that with the fact that out of the 600 million Facebook accounts, about 300 million are on the site more or less every day.

Read more here.



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