Call Center Technology Demystified: The No-Nonsense Guide to Bridging Customer Contact Technology, Operations and Strategy

By Lori Bocklund and Dave Bengtson

Call Center Technology Demystified clarifies the sometimes complex and often confusing array of technologies that enable call center success. This book will lead you through the labyrinth of customer... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0970950780
• ISBN13: 9780970950789
• Release Date: June 2002
• Publisher: Call Center Press
• Length: 375 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Essential book for Contact Center leaders!

I have what I feel is a pretty extensive contact center reference library that I have accumulated over the past 15 years, ranging from call center design, CRM, CTI, speech recognition, benchmarking, telecom, etc. By far, the Call Center Technology Demystified book is THE book that I find myself referring to most often. Besides the holistic view of the contact center technologies, I have found the sections on Building a Customer Contact Technology Strategy and Information and Applications Bring CRM Strategies to Life sections to be valuable every day, every project. Great diagrams and charts add tremendous value to the clear and concise writing. This is also a book that will stand the test of time; the principles surrounding business drivers and the realistic expectations regarding CRM will provide value to contact center strategists for many years.

Great Guidelines for CAll Centers

It's interesting that as I am pursuing new business I constantly have to explain concepts that I just take for granted everyone knows. After going back to this book three times in one week, first to get a better explanation of VOIP, and then ODBC, and just plain old legacy systems, its clear that this is an "encyclopedia" that every call center professional should use.

I was very impressed

I have been in the call center world for a long time, and have seen the fads and the buzzwords and the technology come and go. The authors did a great job in covering the technology necessary to run an effective call center and get the most from your investment.I was particularly impressed how they wove the technology story within the context of the business need. Obviously in an economy where capital dollars are tight, they concentrated on the business need first, and then described the various technologies that could meet that business need. For someone considering an investment, this is a great reference book to have.

A great reference and an excellent guide

The topics of "Call Centers" and "CRM" are becoming each day more popular, as businesses evolve and become faced with the challenge of "growing and adapting" (in order gain competitiveness and excel in the modern economy), but still keeping its relationships and interactions with its customers unique and valuable, increasing loyalty and driving profitability.Ranging / starting from the CEO/CFO/CxO who has to strategically comprehend and support its operations, to the Marketing Executive who will have to define and manage the "branded experience" of its customers with the business through it, to the IT Manager who will be responsible of integrating this new technology to their existing infrastructure, to the Call Center Manager who will deal with it's daily performance evaluations and fine tuning - in essence, the area of Call Centers involves a lot of people and can potentially touch almost every single area of the business, directly or indirectly."Call Center Technology Demystified" does a very nice job in providing clarity about the foundation and the key elements of a Call Center, addressing both the business and the technology sides of the equation. Based on the authors' vast experience in this arena, the book is enriched by real-life examples and applications, as well as illustrated by meaningful facts and compelling statistics, making the reading experience very pleasant.Because of the way the chapters are divided, starting with the fundamentals and drilling down to specific subjects (like Self-Service and Web / Multimedia), passing through implementation considerations and futures, "Call Center Technology Demystified" can serve as an excellent educational source if you are trying to get yourself familiar with these concepts (and get to know "enough to be dangerous"), or if you are a call center professional or work in the area, as a nice knowledge refresher that will help in maintaining yourself informed and updated about this ever-evolving / ever-changing area. In other words, a great reference, an excellent guide, a must-have in my opinion. Congratulations to both authors for the great book!

Comprehensive but concise; opinionated yet unbiased

All of us interact with call centers on an almost daily basis, but few actually understand the complex, interrelated technologies that must be expertly managed to make a call center an asset to a business instead of a liability. Bocklund and Bengtson obviously understand this technology (and the underlying business imperatives) extremely well, and, most importantly, are able to explain it in a clear, down-to-earth manner. There were many times that I could almost hear myself making the same points with the same caveats. I am also impressed with the obvious pains that were taken to keep this guide unbiased--not an easy task when you consider the many vendor-influenced "forks in the road" that are encountered when creating a call center strategy and design. Of considerable value are the numerous tables, diagrams, and appendices--heck, it's worth the price of the book just to get the glossary and acronym decoder! I have yet to find an acronym or term that's not included.