While automated voice technology continues to improve, it’s becoming clear that it will never fully replace the friendly voice of a customer service representative. More and more, companies are beginning to reincorporate live agents into their inbound phone programs. And if you’ve ever been tasked with finding the right call center for your unique program, you know how difficult this process can be. Most call centers will claim their expertise in your industry, and their experience in the type of calls you need them to take or make. But with the high rate of turnover at call centers, you can’t rely on what they did two years ago, one year ago, or even six months ago as a barometer for how they’ll perform on your program today.

Over the years, Triad has developed a systematic 5-step approach for finding the right call center for our clients:

1. Fully understand the requirements of the program and the desired caller experience. Then working with our Client, determine ‘weighting’ for specific evaluation criteria.
2. Identify 5 call centers that would be a good fit for the program objective.
3. Conduct pre-screen interviews with each call center to confirm capabilities and interest in participating in the bidding process.
4. Prepare and send a fully customized RFP to the top 3 call centers based on the pre-RFP interview.
5. Thoroughly evaluate and grade the RFP Responses and deliver Triad’s recommendation to our Client with supporting documentation.
   
   

This process has worked time and time again – and has saved our clients time, effort and money by fitting them with the right phone shop the first time around.

In addition to our process, Triad has developed relationships with a network of call centers across the United States. These centers range in size from just a few highly skilled specialists who only place high-level b2b calls, to large centers with multiple locations and hundreds of agents with the capability of handling extremely large customer service line programs.

If you find yourself needing to set up a call program, give us a call (202.332.3800) or send us an email.

The ongoing debate about the use of alternative mobile and tablet optimized websites will probably never culminate in agreement among the design and development communities. However, with the release of jQuery Mobile 1.1 and its full support for iOS, Android devices, Blackberry OS 6, and webOS, there is certainly a strong argument for development of targeted applications for hand-held device browsers.

The straightforward features of jQuery Mobile, such as page structure, dynamic inputs and ajax form submissions, make it an extremely efficient and a solid choice for mobile browser design and development. Recently at Triad, we have been experimenting with this framework to see how far we can push it while maintaining the seamless ‘app-like’ experience users have come to expect on their mobile devices. We will continue to explore the boundaries of this technology as it has proven to be capable of handing the high level of dynamic integration we rely on at Triad. The short response time, error and success handling, design flexibility and real-world adaptations of some of our current systems have yielded a positive response from our team.

We look forward to having more to share soon as additional opportunities arise for us to implement this for our clients.

Management adjustments can be intimidating. Sometimes they are positive but other times they can be disruptive or complicated. But within every challenge exists an opportunity. Focusing your energy on a smooth transition rather than fretting over the new player can help position you and your project for success.

Recently, the lead manager on one of my projects was replaced. I was apprehensive when I was first informed of the change – I had spent many years building a strong and thriving relationship with the current lead. The project had flourished under our partnership and I was concerned starting over with a new manager would jeopardize that forward momentum. So I made a quick decision to not start over. I couldn’t assume that we were starting from zero and I had to regain the trust of the new manager. Instead I had to believe that they had confidence in Triad as their business partner, and it was up to us to prove them RIGHT over and over again. This decision helped establish a solid foundation for our new relationship and mitigated any risk to the project’s progress and ongoing success.

Utilizing trust as a business strategy is something I learned very early at Triad. It shapes Triad’s internal culture and promotes enduring client relationships. Triad managers have always assumed the best of their employees, trusting they made the right hire and treating their employees like esteemed teammates instead of candidates or expendable parts. This foundation of trust yields confidence among the employees and teamwork across the organization. And applying this key value to my client relationships has proven effective and rewarding.

Welcome to my first blog ever. I am a serial tweeter but this will be my first blog and let me start off by saying that this is for non-video nerds out there who are trying to manipulate videos:

So Triad recently completed a project for one of our clients where we had to manipulate a lot of videos. After some searching I came across FFmpeg (FFmpeg.org) and it is just a beautiful piece of cross-platform solution for achieving that.

I used the command line tool to split videos based on start and end time but it can do a lot more than that. I am trying to see if I can use the command line utility and wrap it into a component.

I will share more of my adventures in video editing and other topics…so stay tuned !!

Triad worked to create a promotional campaign for a Vistage VIP event. The approach was to invite CEOs in select areas to exclusive breakfast meetings where they could experience the value of Vistage membership first hand.

Triad started by isolating the correct data demographic for potential members who met the criteria set by Vistage based on several factors such as business size, annual revenue and location. We then designed and mailed an invitation kit that included a personalized invite, cover letter and RSVP code. The registration microsite was designed and coded following Vistage’s marketing guidelines and directed users to quickly and easily register for the event using their personalized RSVP Code. Triad then placed phone calls to follow up on the invitation and confirm RSVPs.

The events were very successful and more are planned in 2012.

Philip Morris USA, U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Company and John Middleton recently launched a new campaign to help adult smokers and dippers join together to get active on issues they care about.

Triad supported the project by writing content and designing print materials for mailing kits to off-line adult consumers. These kits provide you with information on your specific elected officials and include tips for getting your voice heard. To find out more about the program – and to take action, visit tobaccorights.com.

Every new web application project that comes into Triad brings a new set of challenges. Typically, they also come with a very tight turn-around time and specific style guidelines to adhere to. Since I spend about 65% of my time on the front-end design flats, our team is left with approximately 35% of our allotted time/budget to get our comps into a static front-end followed by code behind functionality. I’d like to share a little bit about the process I focus on during the 35% sprint to transition my designs from compositions to a static coded UI.

The process I have found to be the most effective is to start with the most basic of elements and work the design in from broad to detail.

1. Create the standard mark-up for vb.Net code behind format.
   
   <%@ Page Language=”VB” ContentType=”text/html” ResponseEncoding=”UTF-8″ %>
   <!DOCTYPE HTML>
   <html>
   <head>
   <meta charset=”UTF-8″>
   <title> </title>
   <link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”all” href=”file.css” />
   <script type=”text/javascript” src=”file.js”></script>
   </head>
   <body>
   etc….
   
   
2. Add divs to build a layout structure that is named appropriately.
   
   <id=”header”>
   <id=”primary-content”>
   <id=”secondary-content”>
   <id=”footer”> etc…
   
   Take care to ensure these divs are both efficient for the layout and are also expandable to hold dynamic functionality / content.
   
   
3. Implementing all other classes for detailed design elements and graphics to complete the UI.
   
   
4. Run a check for code validation and tests in all required browsers.
   
   
5. Once all QA checks have been completed, the file its ready for hand-off to the dev team for back-end integration.
   
   
   

In consistently following this process, I have found that my design composition to coded UI time is extremely efficient while also being very quick to resolve non-semantic elements or conflicts. This allows our team more time to spend integrating back-end functionality and maximizing the user experience to peak performance while staying well within our launch schedule and budget.