A Practical Guide to Call Center Technology (Paperback)

by Andrew J. Waite (Author), Andrew J. Waite (Author) "The customer call center has been around for longer than officially acknowledged..." (more)
Key Phrases: customer contact center manager, voice response device, multistage queuing, Practical Guide, North America, Coil Center (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
· How to choose the best call center tools and systems · How to get the most out of ACDs (automatic call distributors) and other complex systems in order to boost customer satisfaction and increase sales · Includes three ready to use RFPs (request for proposals) for buying an ACD, computer telephony system, or recording and analysis solution

Phone calls and emails from customers are not just "events"; they are significant milestones in customer relationships. This book presents a roadmap showing you how to significantly improve customer relationships - whether via phone, mail, fax, email, or Web - by making the best use of call center technology.

You'll discover how to navigate the business, technical, and financial issues in building and managing a customer contact center. The book shows you how to foster enhanced customer satisfaction at a reasonable cost, and how to make the call center an engine of business growth by using technology to up-sell and generate new revenues from existing customers.

No other book provides such practical, in-depth information on managing a call center's technology and workflow. Key topics include staffing, network basics, ACDs; disaster recovery, data gathering and reporting, customer experience mapping and management, CRM, and much more.

About the Author
Andrew Waite is a writer, speaker, and consultant on call centers. Andrew founded Inbound/Outbound Magazine, which later became Call Center Magazine. He has over 25 years of call center experience. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

Product Details

• Paperback: 497 pages
• Publisher: CMP Books; 80.00 edition (January 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1578200946
• ISBN-13: 978-1578200948
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #618,650 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A STRATEGIC CALL TO CALL CENTER TECHNOLOGY, March 6, 2005

By	John R. Vacca "Tech Write Independent Reviewer" (Pomeroy, Ohio) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

For most customer communications, the call of the customer contact center is the point of entry. Author Andrew Waite does an excellent job in this book of explaining the strategies, techniques and technologies to ensure that you get the most out of your telephone call portion of your customer contact center investment. Waite first goes on to explain a few parts and principles that affect the customer call center manager. Next, the author touches on staffing and the importance of adequate labor pools in the location you have chosen to operate your customer contact center. Then, Waite focuses on the telephone call component and the management of telephony workflow. Next, the author deals with the hardware, architecture and relationship between the components and subsystems of a switching system, which includes the automatic call distributor (ACD) system (of which the author acknowledges that there is no easy way to catergorize ACD systems). Then, Waite looks at the instruments used in the traditional call center.

So, as customer contact center managers become more sophisticated and mature in their role, according to the author, they grow to trust the machine data and, thus, need fewer comprehensive reports. Nevertheless, Waite points out one inteesting fact out of all this that is coming out of call center operations: Unless it is a pure direct sales respnse, most calls happen for less than positive reasons.

Finally, with the preceding in mind, Waite has done an outstanding job in this book of identifying the major trends within the customer contact center industry center around explosive technology growth. This has led to a growing library of open architectures with industry standard interfaces, more sophisticated tools reisding in smaller centers and more component applications involved in each transaction.

5.0 out of 5 stars Needed help, March 30, 2004

By A Customer

I was promoted to run the call center in our company. We have two centers with 300 Telephone and Customer sales reps. I have no expernce in computers except for my PC. I bought this book to help me talk to the computer staff. They cannot fool me as much now. They were too busy for the call center. Now they understand we make most of the money. This book help me present this better.

3 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A solid, fact-filled, and highly useful guide, April 11, 2002

By	Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

A Practical Guide To Call Center Technology: Select The Right Systems For Total Customer Satisfaction by telecommunications expert Andrew J. Waite is a highly informational book for businesspeople who need to set up a telephone system to handle customer orders, complains, and other important matters. Fielding long-distance calls from any number of people for good business is no small feat, and chapters from this guide address such diverse issues as basic connection and setup, typical switching systems, the value of an ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) system, and much more. A glossary at the back helps readers unfamiliar with the terminology catch up quickly...A solid, fact-filled, and highly useful guide for anyone who needs to launch an effective and efficient call center -- and keep it running smoothly!