Technology is Power

I have always wondered what the impact of having automated technology, like automated lead management, schedule management, account management and payroll would do to a budding company.

Every enterprise level business has automated business tools.  They have CRMs for customer management, ERPs for enterprise accounting management, HRMS for human resource management, project management gateways for…  Well, you get the drift.

What would happen if we give the power of these tools to small and medium businesses?  What would happen if you gave the average small office organization the power to do more…  For less?

I have been doing some research lately on this subject and I’ve heard three general excuses on why people don’t operate a CRM:

• Cost is too high.  This is a multi-faceted issue…  Cost is not necessarily price – it includes:
  • System downtime
  • Training time – too steep of a learning curve
  • Implementation costs
  • Licensing fees
  • IT support costs
• Our current system works fine.
• We only have one person that deals with that.  No one else needs to know that information.  (This is typically the CEO talking about him or herself)

Unfortunately, these companies desperately need to hire someone in operations.

There are four rules about employees that we must remember:

1. Employees won’t always know what to do,
2. Employees won’t always do what they’re supposed to do, and…
3. Ultimately, they will quit. (or retire!)

The goal of every business should be to create a residual income, so why create a dependency on the owner or CEO?  Any good owner would want to move onto his next venture – and establishing the infinite loop is very important to the sustainability of your company.

For these CEOs that create a dependency on themselves, how do you enforce that your employees are following through with your requirements and tasks, and more importantly, that your customers are being handled properly if you’re, lets say, on a business trip to another country?

It would be great if you could check on the status of your business – your clients – your projects – and your employees from any computer, anywhere in the world, wouldn’t it?

Enter the Business Management System…  <more to come>

Call Center Dreams

I’m working on a conceptual call center management application based on my call center experience.  I’ve used all of the applications, and I’m very aware of the flaws of the call center world.  There are so many things we can do to improve the flow, yet none of them are done.  This is extremely prevalent in outsourced call centers and typically, cannot be solved by the client, but there are still things that can be done to improve flow.

First of all, they should start using web technologies, not remote desktop.  The majority of call centers I’ve worked at use remote desktop to access our call center apps.  There are MANY problems with this from a user interface perspective:

• Some systems will run at full speed, some will run quite slowly – if at all sometimes!  (as they are remote desktop and rely on the network)
• There’s no integration between the applications.
• Some call center positions that I’ve had have required us to open a total of 14 different applications (!) before we even started working!
• Adding more features or adding another workflow typically means adding another program.  (Or 5…)

Employees hate the fact that they have to start work 15 minutes before they get paid to get these systems up.  IT hates having a thousand programs and systems to support, and training makes new agents cry.

Why in the hell do we still have these problems?  I mean, really.  With the advent of RIAs, these applications should be easily built into a single front-end – even if they have 25 back-ends.  What’s more is they can be completely and entirely web-based – no more need to open 14 different programs and windows.