Steve Jobs Was a Total Phreaker

Back in the olden days, make that 2003, when Accurate Always was designing the first Voxida interface, it was an unofficial mantra to "Apple it up." Steve Jobs, leading the Apple design team helm, was the undeniable tastemaker; the user interfaces made the Mac an instant friend, the user docs were helpful and efficient, and the corporate culture was weird. Really weird. Weird enough that they pulled off miracles. So, in 2003, we breathed and ate telecom tech (and those awesome little chocolate covered espresso beans) and more than once did an informal salute to Steve Jobs, the Phreaker.

What a lot of people don't know is that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak illegally (and, this author believes, rather comically,) learned how to place international phone calls, free. Decades ago, Steve Jobs was already thinking different, using blue box devices to seize international trunk lines, with Wozniak even calling the Pope. This was possible by using tones, generated by the "blue box", as in-band signaling, gaming the switchboard.

 Steve, we salute thee. Thanks for the laughs, raising the bar for user interface design and truly being "insanely great." You changed the world and our offering.

 "Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do." -Steve Jobs

Tech Support = Slackers? This Contact Center Recording Company Wonders...

We get very few tech support calls at Accurate Always. Frankly, I wonder if our tech support engineers are getting a little too much down-time.

As you probably already know, Accurate Always manufactures digital call recording systems for healthcare, customer-focused contact centers, aerospace, utility companies, a variety of other in-bound and out-bound call centers, defense and a whole wacky bunch of various industries. Every digital call recording system is hand-built, custom configured and completely tested, so it's as close to plug-and-play as possible when it arrives at the lucky customer's site.

Basic users of these recording systems are usually fully operational and checked out for Awesomeness* within an hour or two of training. In fact, many just do some private tutoring sessions and continue their education at Voxida U, while maintaining full bragging rights that they got it from the get-go. As they actually did.

It's partially because our call recoding solutions are easy to use. From a design and engineering standpoint, "easy" is really hard to achieve. Hats off to these folks, though, as they somehow pulled it off.

The graphical user interface has all the controls needed to record calls full-time, on demand or randomly. Users can live monitor these calls, as their in-house permissions dictate. Sharing call data via email, custom training DVDs or via export is intuitive. Reports can be ran at whim and provide a deeper look at your center's activities than you'd think was possible.

There's a lot more that can be done in this comprehensive interface but it still fails to offer users the ability to control the weather. I hear that's coming in a future release, so please don't give up on us yet.

Since everyone is more-or-less happy, the systems rarely hiccup and training is handled by another underutilized division (hey- if it only takes a few hours... I'm just sayin'), our techs have some down-time.

We often hear customer's talk about their past experiences with industry tech support. One emailed us a link to a little movie that conveyed the overall feeling, if not the exact parties and specifics. Of course, I'm supposed to say that contents of this video are for mature audiences only, etc, etc., and that Accurate Always, Inc. is not responsible for anything I say in this blog or in my life, including what I may be thinking at the moment, had for lunch or what I link to... blah.. blah and so on.... Forget it. I'll just say "here it is"  and be sure to see the "Sales Guy vs Web Dude" video.

*Note: "Awesomeness" is an actual rating of proficiency when using these call center recording systems. At least if Marketing has its say in things....

The Importance of Listening

As you may have gathered, I have a few coworkers with eight toes. Yes, Accurate Always really is an equal opportunity employer.

I was out with one of these fellows, Flax the Man, standing outside in a tech park a short time ago. (For those who have not had the thrill of standing around a tech park, let me tell you it's just another theme park. No big mouse, but a lot of hip rides and uncomfortable get-ups.)

So, my little buddy is doing all the talking for once, stopping a sales rep going into the main entrance. Naturally, said rep happens to be an expert on large parrots and very willing to help. He immediately decides to get in my coworkers face and tell him to "ah-nun-see-ate!" He keeps it up, making a few more comments about bird Yiddish and "isn't this novel." Meanwhile, Flax keeps trying to get through to this guy.

After a short while, I grow tired of hearing "annunciate," in all its glorious iterations, parroted out of Mr. Rep. I figure better I'd introduce myself. But Flax's newest fan is already waxing poetic on how "we all fly a little bit" and I realize it's too late. Much too late.

Mr Flax politely waits, and as soon as a dramatic pause comes on, he says "You don't. You're being a big jerk."

Of course, that was heard five-by-five. We all retreated into our respective offices. With Flax shamelessly chuckling all the way back.

There's got to be a moral in this story somewhere....

But, it also got me thinking about how the answer is in there.

In all fairness to poor Mr Rep, there is so much information, already inherent in our communication, that we simply miss, gloss over or can't filter through it all. Once my delighted coworker was put back in this department, I had a talk with engineering. It was eye/ear opening.

I'm happy to report that Voxida, out-of-the-box, can recording all call metadata and audio, according to rules you set up. Agent interactions, center-wide analytics and a robust reporting engine are ready to roll. And they do. Most companies start to record calls and harvest this data from day one.

The victory? You can get smart, in-house, without needing to rely on outside consultants to tell you reach out to their customers, or find out what they really want/need and how these requests are being handled.

The data is out there and Voxida makes it easy to pull up your calls, as they are live or many years down the road, and harvest this information. Maybe we can all learn to listen yet....