Contact Center Convictions

[#1]

Call centers have been my life for nearly twenty years.  I started out young and eager as an agent for Franklin Covey (known as Franklin Quest when I was there.)  Over a six year span I played many different roles in the 300+ seat operation (training, scheduling, recruiting, supervising, etc.)  My final year at Franklin I even helped develop the software used in the call center. (I had graduated from college with my computer science degree by that point.)

A good friend (at Franklin) convinced me to leave and help start a company with him.  Cumulus was a call center technology company and the two of us started developing a server-based IVR and ACD product.  Nine months into development with version one ready, we also opened up an outsource call center using our own technology.  Somehow, over the next couple years, we managed to sign up 30+ companies and took their calls, and often even shipped their products from our warehouse.  The IVR/ACD product was a huge success and we sold it all over (NY, LA, Argentina, China, Germany, etc. etc.).

We caught the attention of then telecom giant Harris Corp (digital telephone division), a fortune 200 company.  And yep, you guessed it.  POW!  They bought the software rights from us, and a team of Cumulus folks (including me) went to work for Harris.  We set our sights on conquering the world with Harris.  Then POW again! For reasons I still don’t understand, Harris closed the entire division overnight.  Amazingly, a few months later we struck a deal to get the source code back (just code and not the customer base).

So, in late 1999 and we had plenty of time and money and we still wanted to conquer the call center world.  We thought… wouldn’t it be cool if call centers could leverage an ACD, IVR and CTI in the cloud?  What if managing multiple locations or putting agents at home was easy?  Better yet, what if a small or medium call center (under 500 seats) could access the best skills-based routing engine out there that traditionally only the large call centers have (because they invest millions of dollars).  So we formed MyACD, LLC and began an aggressive and complex redesign of our Cumulus ACD/IVR/CTI infrastructure.  We wanted multi-tenancy, resiliency, great reporting, and web-based management and administration.  

We joined up with a local VoIP telecom provider to offer the technology in the cloud.  We then partnered with a Utah-based company (UCN) to leverage their agent sales channel and found good synergy between the companies.  We started selling some nice accounts and again found ourselves operating a very profitable company.  UCN was excited about the technology and we found ourselves in acquisition discussions with them.  

After UCN purchased MyACD (and the product was renamed to inContact) I decided it was time to step away for a while and take a break.  I took 24-months off and it was awesome.  I introduced myself to my wife and four kids and did a lot of skiing, travelling, and coaching. I wrote a book, built a house, and generally had a blast.  One enjoyable activity was donating time to a few non-profit organizations to consult their call center operations (guess I couldn’t get completely away from it).

Again I had time to think about what was next.  After working in a call center, owning a call center, and then selling call center software to hundreds of companies, I was ready to jump back into the call center market.  Workforce management (WFM) always interested me because I saw so many companies struggle with the schedule optimization process.  So, I started ScheduleQ, LLC, an on-demand (SaaS) WFM.  I hired some talented developers and within a year we were ready to roll out version one.  But before we launched, UCN stepped in and said hey- we want your new software and we want you.  They made a good offer and… POW!  So, the dream lives on… I am back to conquer the world.