September 1999

Dear Rich:

I have enjoyed your magazine for many years. It has provided much insight for solving industry-wide issues and preparing businesses for the future. The shows I have attended have been a great place to build relationships and share information. Keep up the great work!

We have entered the age of serving customers through a vast array of media. Your publication has been instrumental in bringing many concepts and ideas to companies that developed and employed them successfully. Being responsible for the customer base in my organization, I would like to visit a truly successful "customer interaction center" that employs CTI, customer service via Internet telephony, e-mail and Web site inquiry.

I am eager to see these forms of customer service in action and see how each aspect is measured from a manpower, quality and profit/loss point of view. I am confident that you have contacts here in Pittsburgh and can recommend such a company that might be willing to share information in this vital area of all businesses. Your feedback is appreciated.

Mike Overby, vice president
Guardian Protection Services, Inc.
[email protected] 

Rich Tehrani responds:

Dear Mike:

Thank you for the fine words about our products. We appreciate the feedback. We receive many requests from readers who want to view a state-of-the-art customer contact center. In response to these requests, we introduced a working Live, Blended Multimedia Call Center at our last CTI™ EXPO Spring ’99 in Washington D.C. The response to this attraction was absolutely incredible many attendees told me that they could not believe how useful it was to have a working call center to investigate right on the show floor. Over 1,000 attendees witnessed 20-minute live call center presentations at the show. In addition, the call center made over 8,000 calls in two days and only took two days to set up. It was absolutely gorgeous and ran much smoother than I ever imagined possible.

The demand was so great that we decided we would once again demonstrate the Live, Multimedia Blended Call Center (among other exhibits) at CTI™  EXPO Fall ’99 in Las Vegas. The TMC™ Labs engineers have taken on the task of launching the first-ever Office Of The Future, a live demonstration of the latest and greatest productivity-boosting CTI tools available. Voice recognition, unified messaging, collaborative computing and other products will be on display. Furthermore, we decided to tie the above attractions to a Live Enterprise CRM (customer relationship management) demonstration that will show how customers should be handled across the various departments of a working enterprise. We will tie in outside sales, inside sales, point of sale (POS) and more at this one-of-a-kind demonstration.

Let me get back to your original question regarding a similar site in Pittsburgh. The problem with suggesting a specific site is that typically every contact center has to pick equipment based on its specific needs, which are typically subject to cost constraints or connectivity issues with legacy equipment. Furthermore, our live demonstrations are being built from the ground up by the TMC™  Labs engineers, the most knowledgeable people in the industry regarding CTI product selection and installation. I don’t trust anyone else to do it right. Even if we could find a fresh contact center that was created in a vacuum and was the ideal center in every way, the likelihood of the builders of such a center sharing their extensive investment in time and energy with outside companies is doubtful. For this reason, we are working with partners and investing tremendous resources to build these demonstrations in Las Vegas. We want attendees to see what TMC™  Labs engineers consider to be the perfect enterprise CRM and Office Of the Future demonstrations. Based on the response to the Live, Multimedia Blended Call Center at CTI™  EXPO Spring ’99, I can pretty much guarantee that you won’t find a better demo of these technologies in a working environment free of outside constraints at any other venue or organization. Of course, it is always much more convenient to see a live demonstration close to home, but I can guarantee you that what you will see at this event cannot be duplicated and simply does not exist elsewhere. It is really worth the trip. Hope to see you in the CTI™  EXPO Fall ’99 Exhibit Hall, December 8-9, 1999.

Sincerely,
Rich Tehrani
President and Group Publisher, TMC