Amtelco’s subscription-based on-call scheduler, miOnCall, is a secure cloud-based on-call scheduling application used to assign schedule coverage, view schedule coverage, and dispatch messages. It syncs with any calendar app that supports the iCalendar specification (RFC 5545), which includes Microsoft® Outlook® 2010 and 2007, Apple®, Google®, Hotmail®, and Yahoo® calendars. Many of these calendars are accessible using a computer, as well as from smartphones and mobile devices.

Amtelco President Tom Curtin stated, “The power, flexibility, and convenience of miOnCall is making it a popular and vital tool with a wide variety of uses. The easy accessibility with all the various calendar apps is helping keep even more people informed.”

In related news, Amtelco’s miSecureMessages, a subscription-based Smartphone paging and messaging application, reports includes all miSecureMessages traffic, including messages sent from Amtelco Infinity, Intelligent Series (IS), or miSecureMessages solutions, messages sent from devices back to Amtelco solutions, and messages sent from device-to-device. Reports can be exported to Excel or PDF, imported into billing software, or sent to clients.

The miSecureMessages log includes the message subject, content, the contact that message was sent from and to, the message sent, delivered and read timestamps, and replies with timestamps within the message thread; records can be filtered by date range, individual, or group. The billing report lists the numbers of messages sent and received by contacts  or groups, and to or from which type of device, as well as total number of messages sent and received for any given individual and group.

The American Teleservices Association (ATA) has requested presentation/panel proposals for its 2012 Convention & Expo, April 29-May 2 at the Westin Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Florida. The sessions proposed should complement the Convention’s theme of “Managing Customer Experience in a Digital World,” which will be highlighted by the nationally recognized keynote speakers. A national marketing campaign will begin shortly and speakers will be highlighted.

Interested speakers should apply by January 31, 2012. Download the presentation/panel info sheet from http://ataconnect.org/convention/docs/2012conventionspeakerinfo.pdf and apply at http://ataconnect.org/convention/callforspeakers.

For question about speaking, contact Lisa Nye Ford at 317-816-9336 x102.

CenturiSoft now meets HIPAA/High Tech requirements on voice and fax delivery via email. Using 256-bit AES encryption technology, CenturiSoft has been able to encrypt these messages before they leave the Centuri Messenger system. Having the actual file encrypted allows delivery to an unsecured device such as a smartphone. When a user accesses the file, they are prompted for the “password key” and are allowed access only if they have the proper credentials. This allows users to receive fax and voice messages the same way and satisfies the security and confidentiality of the message or fax to the end-user. Password key can be set or changed for individual subscribers as often as needed for compliance requirements.

Combined with our ‘Colia’ compliance, earlier this year, [this] signals yet another reason to have CenturiSoft in your customer requirements,” said John Pope, president of CenturiSoft. CenturiSoft is able to offer these capabilities to current contracted customers at no charge and requires no off-line time to update.

OnviSource announced the rollout of OnviCloud, a tiered on-demand and cloud-based services for telecommunication, hosted PBX, and contact center solutions. Cloud services are provided through company’s newly-established Texas data centers in Dallas and Plano. OnviSource has successfully deployed OnviCloud services for its own offices and contact centers in Texas and Oklahoma.  

With a decade of experience OnviSource is positioned to offer a suite of on-demand and cloud-based services. OnviCloud opens the door for companies to rapidly deploy business telephony services, workforce optimization, and automation applications while preserving cash, lowering the total cost of ownership and mitigating the initial risks and challenges of owning and operating new technologies.

OnviCloud is supported by OnviCare Customer Lifecycle Assistance Services, a complete package of customer support solutions to initiate and manage customers’ operations that include trials, professional services, customizations, customer relation management and hands-on training.

In other news, OnviSource’s business process outsourcing services division was named 2010 Top Partner by CenturyLink, a major provider of telecommunications services. OnviSource earned the top honor by out-performing nearly 250 other partners and consistently exceeding its goals throughout last year. “We are honored by this award and are proud to achieve top ranking for our exceptional services and proven value as a strategic partner to CenturyLink,” said Ray S. Naeini, Chairman and CEO of OnviSource.

OnviSource, Inc. is headquartered in Plano, Texas, with an operations center in Oklahoma. OnviSource, provides customer interaction solutions for contact centers.

Professional Teledata added a “secure message” delivery method to its PInnacle Platform, in response to HIPAA/HITECH regulations requiring that sensitive information be secure during transmission from the call center to the recipient. Secure message functionality is available for iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android smart phones and iPad and Android tablets.

Agents submit secure messages for delivery and then are notified when the message has been delivered to the device and again when it is read. Recipients of these messages can “reply” directly back to the call center. History for each message is updated with all activity to provide a detailed audit trail. As with all PInnacle delivery methods, secure message can be automatically sent to recipients without any agent interaction, streamlining the message taking and dispatch processes.

Pat Kalik, president of Professional Teledata said, “We are proud to make state-of-the-art technologies available to our users. These new features will allow PInnacle users to provide additional cutting-edge services to their customers, further strengthening the customer relationship.”

Professional Teledata provides systems and software products for the telemessaging and call center industries.  Contact Karen Black 800-344-9944 x112 for pricing information.

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January 23-26, 2012
2012 Call Center Summit
Hilton Hotel, Orlando, FL
For more information: courtney.green@iqpc.com, 800-882-8684, or www.callcenterevent.com

Congratulations go out to Pat Vos of Intercon Messaging Inc. for winning the 2011 Tom Ryan Award for Ethics, Integrity, and Quality Above All. This honor was accepted at the 47th Annual CAM-X Convention and Trade Show held recently at the Hyatt Regency in Montreal, Quebec.

The Tom Ryan Award is presented annually in memory of one of the contact management field’s most ardent advocates, Tom Ryan. This industry-specific award pays homage to companies that exhibit quality service while adhering to a mandate based on commitment to ethics and integrity above all else. Also taken into consideration is the company’s overall dedication to maintaining a cohesive working environment, practicing ongoing internal and external customer service initiatives and continuous involvement in industry and community programs.   

Based in Grimsby, Ontario, CAM-X (Canadian Call Management Association) is an industry trade association for the call management.     

Amtelco’s Innovation Machine provides an on-line forum for Amtelco customers to submit ideas for new products and suggestions for improvements to existing products. Users can enter ideas, search the database, and rank the usefulness of ideas submitted by others. The Innovation Machine is based on Amtelco’s Infinity Intelligent Series web scripting feature.

When a user submits an idea, the script dispatches an immediate reply that the idea has been received. The script also automatically sends follow-up emails when other users react to and rank the idea, and as Amtelco staff read, react to, and move ahead with the suggestion.

Amtelco customers have used it to submit 224 ideas and Amtelco’s software department has implemented 65 of those customer ideas, with more in the works. The Innovation Machine has increased in popularity as Amtelco customers recognize the value accorded to their ideas by the software development team.

For more information on Amtelco’s Innovation Machine, contact Amtelco at 800-356-9148 or info@amtelco.com.

Etech Global Services, a global business process outsourcer, has received the ATA-SRO Seal of Accreditation. The ATA-SRO incorporates aspects of governmental regulations and consumer protection rules for contact centers. The goal of the ATA-SRO is to assure a positive teleservices experience for consumers and provide an objective system that reinforces companies’ commitment to government compliance.

Companies seeking the highest caliber of customer care, best practices and compliant behavior can apply to receive the ATA-SRO Seal of Accreditation. Knowing that Etech’s contact center is providing the highest level of care and compliance protects both Etech and its clients from potential fines, penalties, attorney fees and resource costs resulting from non-compliant behavior.

"We are highly committed to quality customer care and compliancy," said Matt Rocco, President of Etech Global Services. "The ATA-SRO Accreditation process took over a year and will be a large commitment to maintain. However, this is just one of a number of steps we are taking to ensure that Etech Global Services provides best practice support to our clients."

Etech Global Services (www.etechgs.com) is one of only fifteen contact centers in the world to achieve this impressive accreditation.

Read the October issue of Connections Magazine with our digital magazine viewer.  With this viewer you can:

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With Hurricane Irene bearing down on Virginia Beach, Professional Answering Service owner Angelo Celesia moved his agents to hotels on higher ground and out of harm’s way when he was told to evacuate the building. Agents also brought their laptops so they could continue processing calls using the hotels’ Internet service. Angelo also enlisted the help of some other call centers using the same platform but who were not affected by the hurricane. They were glad to help when the area went black.

In another instance, when Quick Connections in Greenbelt MD had all of their phone lines cut by a backhoe, their phone company told them it would be one week to get service restored. They rerouted their traffic and begin processing calls on their backup system hosted.

Both call centers used Professional Teledata’s hosted service, PInnacle Freedom. Pat Kalik, Professional Teledata president added, “These two success stories prove that the hosted concept can bring significant piece of mind knowing that you are protected from disasters and you can have mutual agreements in place for help at a moment’s notice.”

Amtelco’s Pro Show automated appointment reminder solution is now available as both a premise installation or as a subscription service. Pro Show is an automated appointment reminder solution that delivers appointment reminders by IVR phone calls; it has been available as an on-premises system for several years.

Amtelco’s hosted Pro Show appointment reminder service is housed and operated concurrently at two fully redundant data centers located 275 miles apart in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Both locations are served by multiple connections to the Internet and the public switched telephone network. The hosting data centers are SAS 70 Type II compliant, are equipped with system-operability monitoring software, and are staffed by experienced and bonded service personnel 24/7. The Pro Show system infrastructure, including all hardware, software, and database components, is fully mirrored at both locations.

In other news, Amtelco’s Red Alert automated notification system is compliant with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) information technology security guidelines defined in SP 800.53 and FIPS 199. Amtelco has documented this compliance in the SCAP NIST certification and accreditation package approved by the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Department of Transportation. This provides HIPAA regulation compliance.  Amtelco is using the same information technology security guidelines for HIPAA compliance for other cloud-based products such as miSecureMessages, and miOnCall.

For more information, contact Amtelco at 800-356-9148, or email info@amtelco.com.

Read the September issue of Connections Magazine with our digital magazine viewer.  With this viewer you can:

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Amtelco uses Cisco’s SIP and CTIOS (computer telephony integration object server) tools to integrate its soft agent console solution and its Intelligent Series (IS) suite of call center applications with Cisco’s unified communications manager (UCM) and unified contact center enterprise (UCCE) solutions.  Integration of Amtelco’s IS and soft agent solutions with Cisco UCM and UCCE provides Cisco-based enterprises with access to Amtelco’s suite of call center solutions, including intelligent operator consoles, call center agents, agent scripting and call-flow navigation, Web scripting and workflow navigation, sandbox directory lookup with quick answer/transfer, on-call scheduling, and messaging with secure smartphone paging.

Amtelco is a registered Cisco developer offering call flow navigation with benefits that include simplified agent training, reduced call processing time, increased accuracy, improved customer experience, help desk scripting, and on-call scheduling solutions.

For more information, contact Amtelco at 800-356-9148 or info@amtelco.com.

On Thursday, August 4, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski joined business leaders in Jeffersonville, Indiana to announce the launch of jobs4america, a new coalition of forward-looking businesses committed to creating thousands of new jobs in America.  

More and more contact centers are using new broadband technology like VoIP, video conferencing, and social networking to improve the customer experience, and a growing number of Americans do call center work from home.

Thanks in part to the Commission’s efforts to bring the benefits of high-speed internet to every community in the country, businesses are harnessing broadband technologies to transform the way they operate, improving customer service while creating good jobs across the country.  Broadband allows regions and communities to compete globally, attracting new firms, investments, and jobs with next-generation communications infrastructure.

Chairman Genachowski announced jobs4america’s launch at the site of a new contact center under construction by Accent Marketing Services, a customer engagement company and founding member of the jobs4america coalition, based in Jeffersonville, Indiana.

The Startel National Users Group (TeamSNUG) announced that Dr. Peter DeHaan will be a featured speaker at TeamSNUG’s 25th Annual Conference being held in Albuquerque, New Mexico March 11-14, 2012.  The conference, which is open to both members and non-members, will include sessions on our industry as well as platform-specific educational and training sessions geared specifically for TAS owners, managers, and technical staff.

“We are honored to have Dr. DeHaan at our event and we are excited to hear his thoughts about the future of the TAS industry and how we can prepare for it,” said TeamSNUG Conference Chair Cameron Reichert.  “Having Dr. DeHaan as our keynote speaker rounds out an already value-packed conference schedule.  His session will be enlightening to anyone in the TAS industry.  We welcome our members, non-members as well as anyone interested in utilizing the Startel platform.”

Peter DeHaan has a PhD in business administration and is the owner of Peter DeHaan Publishing Inc, which whose periodicals include Connections Magazine, TAS Trader, and AnswerStat, as well as web-based media and informational sites, such as articleweekly.com, findateleserviceagency.com, and startacallcenter.com.   

For more information visit www.PeterDeHaan.com and www.TeamSNUG.org.

The national board of directors for the American Teleservices Association (ATA) announced that Phil Grudzinski has been named its new CEO, effective immediately.  Mr. Grudzinski formerly served as chairman of the ATA board of directors for four years and has served in a variety of senior management roles within companies such as American Express, General Electric, and Sears Roebuck and Company.

Mr. Grudzinski has over 20 years of progressive leadership experience in retail, corporate, direct marketing, and financial services environments encompassing general management, direct marketing, and financial roles.  He has a proven track record for driving growth and large scale change in complex, multi-matrixed organizations using teleservices as a primary distribution and service channel.

“Phil’s extensive experience with the ATA and the teleservices channel and his proven leadership in transforming business practices made him the best person for the position,” said Lisa DeFalco, chair emeritus of the ATA board of directors, who led the executive search committee that considered candidates.

“Our search process required the committee to carefully consider both the successes the ATA has enjoyed over its history and the challenges we anticipate in the coming years.  Phil brings the ideal combination of knowledge and initiative to further our objectives and secure a bright future for the Association.”  DeFalco continued, “On behalf of the entire ATA board of directors, I would also like to acknowledge Bob Kobek, who took on the role of interim president during this transition.  We thank Bob for his leadership at the ATA.”

“I’m honored to have the opportunity to serve the ATA in this capacity,” said Grudzinski.   “We are positioned today to advance the interests of the industry and consumers in ways that would have been unimaginable even five years ago.  Our members are committed to the association and tirelessly support our causes and initiatives.  I truly believe our best years are yet to come.  I’m excited to assume the leadership of the association at this pivotal moment.”

A new chair will be announced in October, 2011 at the ATA’s Washington Summit.  In the interim the duties and obligations of the chair will be fulfilled by vice chair Mark Boehmer.

Quality Contact Solutions announced that Angela Morris, president of Quality Contact Solutions (QCS), has been awarded the designation of Customer Engagement Professional from the American Teleservices Association (ATA).   The Customer Engagement Professional designation is the culmination of Ms. Morris’ involvement in the ATA at both the national and chapter levels.  Ms. Morris frequently speaks at industry events on call center performance improvement, productivity, and compliance.  She is also certified as an ATA Self Regulatory Organization auditor.  Ms. Morris has been an ATA member since 1992 and was a founding member of the ATA Midwest Chapter board where she currently serves as marketing chair.  

As a recognized industry leader with more than 20 years of experience, Angela views the Customer Engagement Professional designation as a valuable program that will encourage education, participation, and leadership within the call center and teleservices industries.  She noted, “I am fortunate to work throughout the call center industry with some exceptionally talented and dedicated people.  Often-times those people are not formally recognized.  The Customer Engagement Professional designation gives professionals at all levels within an organization an opportunity to work towards and attain formal recognition.” 

Learn more at www.qualitycontactsolutions.com and www.atacep.org. 

Expanding on its Voice of the Customer (VoC) analytics platform, Verint® Systems Inc. announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Vovici™, a provider of enterprise feedback management solutions.  The acquisition will add Vovici’s enterprise feedback solutions to the Verint VoC analytics platform, which helps organizations develop a single solution set for VoC initiatives across voice recordings, surveys, email, chat, and social media.  Combined with Verint’s speech and text analytics solutions and workforce optimization suite, Vovici will add VoC functionality, including advanced survey management, customer profile management, interactive dashboards, and ad-hoc analysis across any customer touch point.