The reliability and resilience of a communications provider should be at the forefront of any decision before commitment is made to any communications provider. It is unfortunate that many contact centres make the mistake of taking services on the basis of price, which is a reckless move on the basis that any contact centre telecommunications provider needs to be rock solid to ensure that the operation of the call centre isn't compromised. The purpose of this article is to empower call centres with some of the questions that should be asked any supplier to ensure that they are reliable and resilient before any commitments are made. Read more
In 1921, the first telephone kiosk was introduced to Britain, and was given the imaginative name of Kiosk No 1 (abbreviated to K1). Whist the introduction of the first telephone kiosk was welcomed by many, the design of the kiosk was considered to be conservative and old fashioned. Two years after the introduction of K1 there were two independent schemes established in order to redesign the K1, however, it wasn't until 1924, and the introduction of the Royal Fine Art Commission that the redesign project was brought together. The Royal Fine Art Commission were responsible for examining questions of public amenity or artistic importance referred to it by government departments or other bodies, and as part or this responsibility, they invited three leading architects Sir Robert Lorimer, Sir John Burnet and Giles Gilbert Scott to contribute designs. Read more
Otelo, Office of the Telecommunications Ombudsmen, was introduced on the 1st January 2003. The service that has been set up to investigate consumer complains about telecom services. Read more
The UK call centre has always been a fantastic mechanism for large operations to deliver telephone based services on a large scale to their customers. Historically, all of these services have been operated within the UK, however, there was a time where there was a dynamic shift within the call centre industry, where the vast majority of operations were outsourced overseas. In fact, such was the severity of this shift within the industry, there was a period of time where the term call centre was synonymous with outsourced overseas operations in India and the Philippines. Read more
Given that many business operations would grind to a halt if their telecommunications services developed a significant fault, or failed altogether, the importance of a reliable and high quality voice network cannot be understated. Given this fact, below are some fundamental requirements of a high quality voice network, which should be considered before contracting with any supplier of telecommunications service. Read more
In the modern era people have become accustomed to having their call answered by an automated IVR (Interactive Voice Response) Menu when they call any large organisation that uses a call centre to answer their inbound calls. The reason why such organisations implement and use this type technology, is to obtain significant improvements in their operational efficiency by having the caller provide information, such as the nature of their query, before their call is connected to a call centre agent. If a caller is able to navigate through a series of options in order to specify the reason for their call, it will save a considerable amount of time when compared to the amount of time it would take a call centre agent to do the same thing live on the call. More recently, this concept has been taken a step further through the introduction of speech recognition to further improve operational efficiency by increasing the amount of information that can be collected before a call is connected. Read more
A Codec is a technical term for the following variations, which essentially mean the same thing: compression - decompression / compressor - decompressor / Code Decode. In practice the compression and decompression is done by a computer program for the purpose of transmitting data over a data connection and allows them to be translated when they reach their destination. Within the telecommunications industry, the data transmitted through the Codec would be the packets of data that make up a call. Read more
The Telephone Preference Service, or TPS, is an 'opt-out' register which prevents individuals from receiving unsolicited marketing calls. It's a free and extremely useful service used by a huge number of people - an estimated 17 million - to avoid these inconvenient calls, even being put to use by companies. This is thanks to the fact that the Corporate Telephone Preference Service (CTPS) was set up in June 2004, giving corporate businesses and organisations the chance to opt-out of being on the receiving end of unsolicited market calls. Also the legal definition of 'individual' includes SoleTraders and Partnerships (excluding Scotland), and so these have had the opportunity to register onto the TPS since May 1999. That is when the Telecommunications (Data Protection and Privacy) Regulations1999 came into action, allowing people to register to the list. The British direct marketing industry administers the list on behalf of Ofcom. Read more
