Herman and Dorothy Shooster
INTERACTIVE RESPONSE TECHNOLOGY
In retrospect, if we went ahead with older technology we would have had a solid plat- form for growth. It took years to perfect the Microsoft systems. An article appeared in the newspaper featuring our new call center. It attracted David Ferrari, from Rockwell International. They were the makers of the first call center system. Call centers were created as an outcrop- ping of the airline industry. After Rockwell built jet passenger planes, they needed a way to book reservations over the phone, so they invented the call center. David toured our company, and we gave him a demo of our soft- ware. There was nothing on the market like it. He alerted Rockwell. Within a few weeks, they signed an exclusive agreement for us to build software for them. To sweeten the deal and
Call Centers need specialized software. We invested in a start-up company, Interactive Response Technology (IRT), taking a 25% ownership and a sweetheart deal to own an enterprise license of the software. The first thing IRT did was secure the key domain for the entire industry, www.callcen- ter.com, a brilliant move. The visionary behind the new compa- ny was, Michell Pierce. His small team used the beauty of Microsoft’s brand new Visual Basic to create the flexibility needed for the call center industry. It had the ability to drag things around, so you could set them up in a pleasing way, change colors and fonts, enforce logic and apply tools for both exporting and reports, plus unlimited possibilities.
424
Made with FlippingBook. PDF to flipbook with ease