Am Dienstag, den 18.09.2007, 17:33 -0400 schrieb James FitzGibbon: > On 9/18/07, David Gomillion <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I've stayed out of this thread for a long time, and really > didn't read the past comments, so if I'm repeating someone, > I'm sorry. I've been thinking this for a while, and just have > to say it. If you feel like you have to keep people from > turning off the auto-answer feature on a softphone, you don't > need a new softphone. You need new people. > > Yes, but have you ever drawn up a budget for a full-blown meatware(tm) > upgrade?
I do not know American work law, but if you tell your people to NOT turn off auto answer, and they do for having a break, would that not count as work refusal? As long as they get all the breaks they are supposed to take, of course. If for example a cashier in a supermarket here in Germany would just leave her position for a few minutes for a smoke, small-talk or whatever, outside her assigned break times, she could afaik get a written warning, and at the second occasion the full wad of papers (aka been fired). On the other hand, if you count only times while they are on-a-call, with appropriate logging software, adding a few seconds per-call for overhead, as their worktime, they pretty soon will keep auto answer on to get the required number of work minutes during their shift, I would expect. But this is not as much a technical problem as a social one: If your agents are unmotivated, they might spend time talking off-business to any caller/callee on the phone that seems to be interested in small-talk, and _that_ you could hardly find out technically. So you might get an upgrade without paying for the deinstallation of the previous "meatware", but the installation process of course has costs. BTW putting too much pressure on your agents might do bad things to their effiency, motivation, even mental health. Getting the balance between control and good atmosphere right is not easy, and something that cannot be generalized but must be tailored to the situation. The value of a "human asset" (imagine me vomiting my way through those words) can materialize in the number of sales, calls, ... and also in the customer experience he creates, which is hard to be counted in numbers. For example, I recently bought some music instrument and accessories at a phone-order company. The people there were relaxed, friendly, helpful and made the effort of giving me competent, quick information that I needed. All contact with them was extremely positive. As I needed some more stuff that I knew was a bit cheaper at another store (which only deals with customers in a matter-of-fact way), I decided to honour that effort. I also recommended the company to friends, which they probably will never know about and as such cannot count in as a bonus for their sales personell. *Just my loose change. Man, there were lots of coins in that purse.* > Makes Vista look like a picnic. IMO Vista is an apple short of one ;-) To get the Asterisk relevant topics: You could - count on-call minutes to rate agent performance - track off-call intervals on a certain line and so track the turned-off auto answer - do some "social engineering" or "policy work" to get this sorted in a non-technical way (work contract terms, etc) - pay some softphone manufacturer to implement needed changes BTW what would hinder your agents from shutting down the softphone app when they do not want to answer calls? What would hinder them from just not talking to the caller when they do not want to? Best regards, Anselm _______________________________________________ Sign up now for AstriCon 2007! September 25-28th. http://www.astricon.net/ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
