Most call center managers think abandoned calls are a bad thing. Their dashboards show abandoned calls in red, and fanciful customer service supervisors like to put big frowny faces on reports that track abandons from their ACD queues. Their lives are centered around staffing to pre-determined service levels and answering calls quickly so that customers don’t hang up while waiting on hold.. There’s so much anxiety around abandoned calls that an entire industry around workforce management has sprung up to deal with it. It may seem a little crazy to think that abandons could ever be a good thing, but it’s true – abandoned calls can be a sign of excellent customer service.

All it takes is one critical feature – per-queue hold treatment.

Most call center software, ACDs, and PBXs only play one type of messaging while callers are in queue. Sometimes its elevator music or company propaganda, but usually it’s not useful. Systems that only support one type of hold music mean that every caller has to hear the same message. But what if you could give each caller a unique and helpful message based on why they called you in the first place?

You could play frequently asked questions to callers in your support queue; automatic bill pay instructions to callers in your Accounts Receivable queue; and your website address or product promotions in your sales queue.

If your hold treatment tells your customers how to change their password, pay their bill, or buy online, they’ll hang up – they’ll abandon. And that’s a good thing!  Maybe call center managers should start thinking about “good” abandons as normal calls with negative handle time the next time they see an ACD report with red marks all over it.

It’s amazing to me that so many businesses in this country are still using technology that was starting to become dated back in the ’80s.  Sure, American businesses replace computers every few years – thank you Microsoft and Dell – but that’s about it.  Teleportation devices?  Nope.  Holographic displays?  Nada. A desktop telephone as smart as their mobile phone?  Not a chance.

Instead, today’s office looks depressingly like it always has, so don’t feel bad if this sounds like your workspace: a beige colored plastic work surface, a fax machine that dims the lights when it warms up, a slightly-loose chair that rolls into tiny “carpet saver” grooves no matter where you position it, and colorless cube walls frayed with sweater-like fuzz from the last poor soul to Velcro-up pictures of his kids.  Oh, and I’ll bet that office cube sports a fancy 1997 plastic desktop phone with a slightly-but-disgustingly discolored earpiece.  Right?

This is nuts, people.  While teleportation and holographic displays are still out of our reach, we don’t have to settle for dumb business phones anymore.  Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a business phone that did more than make and receive phone calls?  Maybe one that was smart in a way that no other business phone has ever been smart?   I’m not talking about artificial intelligence or something that runs Angry Birds; I’m talking about a business phone that helps you do business (you know, selling and servicing customers) because it’s integrated with your business data.  A phone that knew who you were speaking with every time you made or received a phone call and was smart enough to push that information to your CRM system.  As an executive, what would that business look like to you?

There would be no cubes, no ugly plastic “work surfaces”, and no depressing mediocrity at that company.  The sun would shine, the desks would be wood, and the air would smell like chocolate chip cookies.  Your fax machine would be in the recycling bin, the chairs would float on magnetic fields, and your managers would always know which of your best accounts haven’t been called in a while.  And those ugly plastic desktop phones with less intelligence than a wrist watch?-Banished.  The fancy new M5 VoIP phone sitting in its place would shine like a beacon of joy to all that passed.

For years, medium size businesses and enterprises had two separate phone systems. Employees that were responsible for sales or customer service got their own special Call Center System, while the rest of the business had various simple PBX, or private branch exchange systems. Rarely did the two meet, so IT and telecom departments found themselves supporting two separate systems. Why? Because call centers are special and they need much more out of their voice system than knowledge workers. The need to report on and manage metrics such as abandon rate, time to abandon, speed to answer, talk time, and service level has driven this divergence.

What would happen if you could put everyone on one system, with calls flowing seamlessly from call center agents to the rest of your company during peak times? What would happen if you could bring queuing, quality analysis, and call center style reporting to groups that don’t consider themselves call centers? What would happen if you didn’t have to buy, upgrade, connect, maintain, debug, and otherwise manage the infrastructure for two separate islands of technology?

M5’s customers are finding out the answers to these questions. VoIP has become a tornado of innovation for both analytics and contact centers. With the release of M5 Callfinity Contact Center, we’ve completed the integration of Callfinity – a company we purchased back in April 2011 – with our market-leading enterprise managed VoIP service. As we work with our customers and help them track their progress, we’ll report back on the success stories we see by tearing down the walls between their contact centers and the rest of their employees. Stay tuned!

After reading the recent Forbes article on the 10 most hated jobs, I wasn’t surprised to see that IT Directors, more than any other position, hate their jobs.

Please. Of course they do. With shrinking budgets, demanding business users, and conflicting requirements, I’d be discontent too.  If only there was something that IT managers and business users could agree on – a doctrine for a way of doing business that allowed their company to focus on core competencies while outsourcing their headaches to other companies  that specialize in those areas.   It needs a lofty name, though — something that conjures up heavenly images of peace and tranquility. Ether? Elysium? No, wait – I’ve got it – the Cloud.

Yes, friends, this holds a lot of promise.  I often hear from our customers’ IT directors that  outsourcing their phone systems to the Cloud was the one thing everyone at their company could agree on.

I love my job for a lot of reasons, but one of them is because I get to help folks that otherwise might hate their jobs if it weren’t for our phone-system-in-the-Cloud service.  They come to us despondent about ancient hardware and hated phone companies, aching from the burden of requests from their call center managers, longing for an expert in this strange stuff to come to their rescue.  When we’re able to further manage everything for them – the installation, configuration, end user support, carrier services, integration of their communications data with their business data, and so much more – it puts us just about as far from this job-hating list as you could imagine.

See our recent blog Attention IT Directors: Top 10 reasons to move your phones to the cloud, for more information on how a phone system in the cloud can help your department and your business.

Does your company allow, or even encourage, working remotely?  We are getting the distinct impression that an increasing number of companies are recognizing the productivity, loyalty, and quality gains available when their workforce is (at least partially) remote.  Traditionally, there have been at least three reasons why this hasn’t taken off:

1. Fear of worker productivity loss. What if (gasp!) Brian spends an hour taking his dog for a walk instead of following up on emails?  Managers that expected micromanagement expected the worst.
2. Fear of diminished value. What if (gasp!) Amy doesn’t think Brian is working because she can’t see him? Employees that were used to micromanagement also expected the worst.
3. Technological limitations. Few organizations, until recently, had the infrastructure to support remote workstations, VPN connections, and VoIP phone service.

The tide is changing.  Maybe the trailblazers like JetBlue that embraced a work-at-home program dispelled some of the myths, or maybe micromanagers were rendered obsolete by companies that needed to become more efficient to deal with an economic downturn.  And maybe service providers like M5 have bridged the technology gap so that office phone service can be used anywhere employees are.

Today, M5 clients love their remote workers, and remote workers love M5, for lots of reasons: the ability to move your M5 phone to other locations (don’t forget to update your e911 location), find me/follow me, simultaneous desk/alternate phone ringing, call coverage, M5 Scribe for voicemail transcriptions via email, M5 Replay for call recording, and free ad-hoc and reservationless meet-me style conferencing all make remote workers more productive.  And that’s not all … stay tuned for more to come on the mobility front in the next few months.