It’s possible to get so fixated on the particulars of what we do in our business every day that we lose sight of the overall picture. For example, what business are you in? Hotels?  
Telecommunications? Transportation? Computer applications and deployment? Voice over Internet Protocol? Selling anvils to coyotes? Mafia hit man?

Wrong. You’re in the customer satisfaction business. Appliance deployment professionals NEI know this, and a recent blog post was written to remind their industry colleagues that no matter what line of work you think you’re in, you’re in the business of pleasing customers and providing goods and services that are valued by other people enough to pay for more than once.

In the highly informative post, NEI’s President & CEO Greg Shortell wraps it all up under the headline of “The Experience.” It’s not just the product; it’s not just the service that you’re selling. A great VoIP phone system sold by rude sales people, delivered by indifferent contractors and installed by surly, uncommunicative technicians is a bad overall customer experience.

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Your faithful TMC Australasian correspondent checking in here from the TMC offices in Mangawhai, New Zealand. Turning our attention from Megaupload, another fine day in New Zealand tech history, to today’s topic:

Call Trunk lets you record any phone conversation you want. Great. Is that legal?

Writing for Gizmodo Australia industry observer Nick Broughall, who identifies himself as somebody who uses call recording on a professional basis from time to time, gives the basics of how Call Trunk works, which show why it’s such a useful little idea.

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How does one go about constructing an IVR system that can be used by people who don’t like IVR, whose needs aren’t met by IVR and who would rather talk to an actual person, preferably one with a reasonable command of the English language?

Simple: Design an IVR that knows when to gracefully bow out.

A precis on the IVR Deconstructed blog for a recent study by the University of Rochester and University of Illinois, titled “Robust Design and Control of Call Centers with Flexible IVR Systems,”  
mentions that the study argues that “businesses don’t have to choose between cost savings and service quality anymore -- they can design flexible IVR systems that satisfy all customers.”

And the way to do this, it concludes, is by designing an IVR system that knows when to hand a customer off to a non-IVR system.

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Oh no, not another New Year’s Resolution guilt trip...yes, sorry, we have to do it. However, don’t worry about spending three hours in the gym every day; instead focus on this vital virtualization idea which consists of lowering energy costs with automation.


As a recent blog post from Carousel Connect shows, virtualization can help you save up to $36 per PC per year. That’s the estimated cost of each employee when they leave their computers and monitors on when leaving the office to go home for the night. With the right desktop power management, you can eliminate much, if not all of that.

Okay, 36 bucks doesn’t sound like a lot, but multiply that by the number of computers in your entire operation and it adds up to real money.