While in Dallas, Texas recently, TMC’s CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) found time to sit down with Spectrum Corp.’s VP of sales and marketing, Dan Boehm. The company’s a graybeard in the industry, having started out in the call center space in 1971 -- one year older than TMC (News - Alert), by the way. “We’ve listened to our customers, and changed the organization to meet what they want us to do,” Boehm explained, “creating other divisions and diversifying ourselves to remain profitable.”

Back then, Spectrum (News - Alert) was a pure hardware company, talking to the ACDs and PBXs, devices which would send them information. “We would display it on a wallboard.” Needless to say things have changed since then. “Most of what we do today, we go out and extract information from the customer sources, and bring it in to our software, manipulate it and send it out again as software to maybe an LCD screen a customer may have, but also to web reports, email, smartphones and dashboards. The old LED wallboard is such a small part of our business today.”

Boehm addressed the issue of contact center agents, and how their attitudes have changed -- “they don’t look at the contact center as the place for them,” where they really want to stay, they don’t care how much they’re getting paid, they’re walking away from it. “That’s why we’re seeing a shift from India to the Philippines,” Boehm said, adding that there are other factors as well, but that’s certainly a major shift he’s seen recently. “US companies are saying ‘this isn’t working for us,’ they need to make a change.”

In such cases, Boehm says, the agent is the face of the organization, and making a positive customer experience sometimes means finding an agent who isn’t just reading from a script, but who really knows the product.

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