Earning the confidence of this new type of client was not easy. We had our head handed to us more than once. Yet, despite our fears, we grew, perhaps more slowly than some of our spectacular competitors, but still, we did signif- icant business with a lot of potentials. A couple of our competitors created huge businesses within a few short years, and some of those same companies would fall just as quickly. For me, the livelihood of running my own busi- ness, staying out of debt, and giving my family a chance to grow was the main goal. I couldn’t risk everything. I was already 60 years old. One thing is certain; I could not have accomplished as much as I did were it not for the substantial contributions of my wife and my children and their families. CREATING A CALL CENTER We decided to create a call center. Stephen wanted to build it himself. I encouraged him, and we visited a local call center run by AT&T. While visiting, I asked our guide how long does it take to train these people? I was told six weeks. Then I asked how long do they stay? He said three months. I turned towards Stephen and said, “We can’t learn anything from these people,” and cut the visit short. He bought a used Nortel phone system and started to build it. Not wanting extra costs for the telephone circuits he invented a gadget called a loop start to ground start converter. It worked like a charm, saving hundreds of dollars monthly. Next, he installed multiplexers. They could compress voices digitally, further reduc- ing our costs without affecting the quality. Making strides, his next advancement was the channel bank. The phone company started offering digital circuits called T-1s. One of these four-wire circuits could replace 24 phone lines, creating another significant savings. It also worked like a charm. Soon, he had a rack full of them. Our computer room was growing. Finally, he got to the core of a call center, the automatic call distributor (ACD). While Wendy and I started to focus on selling call center services, he focused on perfecting the
Mitchell Pierce, lead developer for IRT, and Herman Shooster.
experience. We still needed a lot of things, all capital intensive; a generator, back-up batteries, software, a computer network, and cubicles. In many ways, the answering service was at least ten years ahead of the call center industry in technology. The primary feature the answering service had was screen pop, the coordination of a phone call with a comput- er screen. We were very familiar with this feature. As we applied our focus to the call center, we took the focus off the answering service, and it suffered. Mike was watching the books seeing its demise. I was coaching him saying, a business has a lifecycle. He would have none of that. He bumped the market- ing costs and made sure it flourished. Even- tually, the name the names changed: Ding-a- Ling became Answering Service Care, and the call center was at first called Communication Service Centers until it finally became Global Response. We were growing, earning an impeccable reputation along the way. When also learned that unlike the answer- ing service when a client cancels you must let the people associated with the project go. This might have been the single most important lesson we learned about running a call center; The day a project is over is the day the people must be released.
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