Technical skills are important when locating your call center

When trying to decide where to locate your call center, there are many issues that you need to keep in mind. Of course, the standard considerations of telephone and power infrastructure, tax issues, adequate labor pool, and pleasant surroundings must be taken into account. But one item that is not quite so obvious and often overlooked in the evaluation process is the availability of skilled labor to help run the technical aspects of your call center. Is there an adequate supply of individuals with MIS-type knowledge, or can your selected location help draw this type of person to work at your call center?

Raising The Bar Of Assumed Computer Knowledge

The bar has been raised for what is considered minimal required skills in the computer industry. Young adults fresh out of high school are more computer literate than most people in their thirties because computers are now an integral part of today's education. And don't forget about the grade school kids who are teaching their parents how to use the Internet!

All of this computing knowledge is necessary to make sense of the myriad hardware, software and networking choices available today. In addition, systems have become much more complex and additional skills are needed to work effectively in today's computing environments.

Wanted: Qualified Technicians For Our Call Centers

It's important to keep these facts in mind as you locate your call centers. Even if the software application you are using to run your call center is very simple, you still need a support person, or persons, to maintain the equipment and, if yours is a service agency, get the data to and from your client site and present the data in a format that is pleasing to the client. In addition, problems will occurnot because you have faulty equipment, software or people, but because you have a large number of people using computers.

Most of the call center applications available today are easy to set up and simple to run. A vast majority of software companies will also provide you with some type of training and technical support as part of the purchase price of the software or for an additional charge. Knowledgeable professionals may even come out to your site to help install and set up the system they have sold to you.

But don't expect the people who sold you the CTI software to teach someone who doesn't possess basic computing skills, such as how to use a PC or the concepts of database software. Again, the bar has been raised and this is expected knowledge. It is now assumed that the internal employees assigned to help set up the system will have basic knowledge in computer hardware. networking and databases.

Also, don't make the mistake of thinking the outside consultant who sold you the software will take the place of internal technical support personnel. Most technical support people will be glad to hold your hand in some areas, but will not usually stay around to maintain every hiccup in the system.

Getting Things Up And Running...Smoothly

The initial launch of your call center is probably the most critical time. Again, if you're in the service agency business, you are trying to impress clients by being able to get your data, manipulate it and put it back in some format that pleases your client. And this format may be different for each of your four different clients who are each running several different campaigns. If each campaign requires a different type of reporting and gives you data in a different format, it is going to take some effort to make sure the process works correctly.

Although the software you purchased probably has the ability to do this, you need someone who can make this happen -- quickly, easily and in time to impress your clients. This someone also has to be able to deal with changes or minor emergencies. A full-time, on-site MIS professional needs to be employed by the call center to take care of these things. Unfortunately, most people setting up a call center overlook this important job, because they don't understand the complexities of setting up and running CTI applications in a call center.

Necessary Qualifications

There is no set scale to help you determine how many technical people a particular call center needs. This will depend on the size of your call center and the complexity of your project. In addition, the skills needed for a specific call center will vary, again depending on the complexity of the network and the needs of the call center.

It's safe to assume, however, that the bigger or more complicated your call center, the more qualifications or more qualified individuals you may need to help you run the call center efficiently from a technical standpoint.

An understanding of PCs, networks, phones and some experience on the hardware in use is definitely a starting point when looking for individuals who can provide your call center with technical support. Most important, solid knowledge in the concept of databases is essential.

Consider Talent In Your Search

You can build a call center anywhere, but how you staff it is vital. You may have the best equipment available, leading-edge applications and state-of-the-art networking, and your managers may be the best in the business and your agents may be trained to perfection, but if you can't keep your systems operating effectively, you're in trouble.

Keep in mind that available talent, not just available labor, is important when evaluating a call center site. There are so many people getting into the call center business, the only way to start delineating yourself from the others is to provide better service. This doesn't mean just making more phone calls. This means making better phone calls, and one important way to do this is to hire qualified computer support people to ensure your call center consistently runs smoothly.

Tim Davis is the president of Davis Software Engineering, Inc. (Dallas, Texas), a software development firm specializing in design, implementation and installation of computertelephony integration (CTI) business solutions.

Copyright Technology Marketing Corporation May 1997
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