August 1999

I liked TMC Labs’ feature suggestions in the article, “PC-PBXs: How They Stack Up” (May 1999) and have a few comments on some of the data in the table. You indicate that with TeleVantage, phones do not work when the operating system fails, and 1 line per board works when power fails. Actually, it’s four lines per board and it works for both power fail or OS fail.

I see that you are not using the BCP Connection Panel on your TeleVantage system and I know you use T1. This is likely part of the confusion. It’s actually the panel that monitors that power supply and OS health. Power is connected to the panel so it can monitor that and you connect the panel’s serial cable to the COM port on the PC. TeleVantage has a separate “watchdog” process that sends a “heartbeat” to the COM port. If the OS hangs up, the heartbeat stops and the panel goes into bypass mode, just as if power went out.

It’s more complex to fail-over T1 lines. Most PBXs tell you to get one or more analog lines in house on the wall for emergencies. Of course you can do this with any PBX, even the PC-PBXs. However, with TeleVantage you could also plug that analog line(s) directly into the BCP Connection Panel. So, when power or the OS goes down, TeleVantage automatically connects your fail-safe analog lines to your key phone extensions, rather than making you run to the emergency phone in the closet.

Lee Schlenger

The following letter refers to Tom Keating’s Cc: in the June 1999 issue, "The Thrill Is Gone"

I don’t doubt that multimedia customer service may become a standard feature of call centers. I think it is a mistake to think that companies like Amazon.com can deliver the goods as cheaply if you have to talk to an agent. Unfortunately, companies often do not reward customers who can be self-sufficient with better prices, passing on their call center costs to everyone.

If Amazon.com wants to add a 10 percent surcharge for multimedia customer service support, that would be great, but they should not force self-service customers to pay for it.

As one of the original engineers at Teloquent Communications, I am not as sure as you that the market for PC-enabled telephony and video will come about “very soon.” Even among businesses, it is not always easy to get people to use their PC as a phone. While lots of these changes are indeed coming, I would bet it’s still more years away than existing startups have to get profitable.

Mitchell J. McConnell

Tom Keating responds:

Maybe there should be a “premium” paid for customers who click a button on a Web-site to reach a “live” agent, so the extra cost are incurred by people who can’t get what they need from the “self-service” Web site.

However, in my opinion, the costs associated with Amazon installing and maintaining a call center will more than pay for itself by the agents actually closing sales (as well as upselling) to customers with questions. So charging “full service customers” a 10 percent surcharge wouldn’t make much sense.
If you recall the example I gave in my Cc: column, I didn’t buy the book from Amazon because I needed a question answered first. I ended up buying the book elsewhere. That’s revenue that Amazon lost. So while call centers will initially incur some costs on the part of any e-commerce company, they are certainly a revenue generating stream, and ultimately the best e-commerce sites will all have one.