IMCCA

See International Multimedia & Collaborative Communications Alliance.

Informal Call Center

Also called a casual call center, a term coined by Blair Pleasant at the PELORUS Group. (Raritan, NJ 908-707-1121, www.pelorus-group.com)

It happens in almost every business from big bank to small publishing company. So-called knowledge workers are humming away (thinking, calculating, writing, programming, doodling, etc.) when their phones ring. They answer. Callers are looking for information or help. These workers (hopefully) do their best to oblige. Certainly it s not as regimented as the formal call center, where well-armed agents wait ready and willing for calls and caffeine-addled supervisors drool over real-time call-processing performance pie charts. Still, the ubiquitous informal or casual call center does represent a vast arena for computer telephony technology to flourish in. Indeed, it s one that potentially dwarfs the traditional call-center market. How far have we gone in exploiting this killer opportunity area? Well, as intuition and a new comprehensive CT report suggest, we ve only just begun.

Computer telephony technology is succeeding in the formal call center. Now it must slip into something a little more comfortable and saunter into what Blair pleasant playfully tagged the Casual Call Center (CCC) or Informal Call Center (ICC).

What is a small to mid size or small and informal call center? To begin with, the actual number of agents does not really define a small or an informal call center. In fact, small call centers and informal call centers can vary from 2 agents up to 40, sometimes...