Before I write about what I do I need to build up the foundation as I see it. What is a Call Center? Traditionally a Call Center is a location where you have multiple call center agents dealing with customers over the phone. There are two main types of call center applications: inbound and outbound. By inbound I mean calls coming into a call center from the outside. Usually these will be customers placing orders or calling for support. An outbound application is one where calls are placed to the customer. Two examples of outbound applications are telephone solicitations and bill collecting.

What does call center software do? Well, let's imagine how a call center would work if there were no computers. For an outbound center an agent would have a printed sheet of numbers to call, along with the customer information. They'd probably have a printed script if they're trying to make a sale. For an inbound center that takes orders the agent would just fill out the order form as each order comes in. For a support center the agent would probably be a technician so that they can support people directly, or the agent should at least be able to forward the call to an agent.

In both cases you want to have agents with a certain skillset. They should be personable on the phone, able to think a bit on their feet, and have some amount of knowledge of the products being sold or supported. Also in the inbound case customers generally call one number and somehow that number has to be answered by one of several agents. This is done by a piece of hardware called a switch. A phone switch connects phone calls to their destinations. Switches come in all shapes and sizes, though all are bigger than a breadbox. They also differ in their capabilities.

A simple switch setup is one hookup to a terminal or computer for configuring the switch, one hookup to the telephone network, one hookup to a switchboard, which is a bunch of phone ports that are connected to the office telephones. The telco (telephone company) connection is usually some amount of T1 lines, each T1 capable of handling 64 calls. If you have less than that many phones it's cheaper to have the telco handle the switch for you at their office. In California this is a Centrex system. In a real call center where you're trying to keep all the agents busy, you'll have about as many agents as lines to the telco (64 agents per T1). In an office setup where people aren't on the phone constantly, a T1 line should be able to handle 250 telesets.

Before there was call center software there was, and still is, switch software. With switch software you can set up what are called Automated Call Deliver (ACD) queues. Any inbound call hitting an ACD queue will be routed to any open teleset assigned to that queue. Why would you want to this? You only have one order number or support number (usually an 800 number). If a customer calls that number they should be routed to an agent. Customers dialing directly can get to a non-agent teleset in your company. If you actually have several 800 numbers and different agent groups then having multiple ACD queues is useful.

ACD queues come into their own in a large call center, with dozens to hundreds to thousands of agents (although a call center with thousands of agents would actually be split up into several smaller call centers). Only the largest conventional companies have call centers this large: phone companies for the most part. An independent call center on the other hand, handles the call center needs of many smaller businesses. Now you have dozens of 800 numbers, each going to partially overlapping sets of agents, depending on how much the customer company is paying for quality of service.

But here you come up to a big problem: no switch software is written to be easy to use and configure. I've read several manuals and nowhere can you change one agent from one ACD queue to another without changing setup fields in multiple screens. I'm talking about software that uses numbers to configure everything (not names), that is usually gives you prompts such as "RTL3?" or "HLDX" and that you then have to look up in a manual to figure out what the switch is asking you.