By Michael Spiegel
President, ITA Consulting Group and Intervox Group Affiliiate

After working for large companies for almost 15 years, about 10 years ago I ended up, through no fault of my own, being the manager of a project that made no financial sense whatsoever. Needless to say, the reasons for this were not apparent at the start of the project, but by the time they were, the project had a lot of senior support, and it had become difficult to stop. Not impossible, but difficult.

I discovered that my tolerance for getting up in the morning, going to work and wasting my time had grown quite limited, and I surprised myself by volunteering for a severance package which wasn't worth all that much because of my relatively few years with the company. I surprised a few others as well, particularly my family, because I hadn't made any plans on what to do next, and I was not, by nature, a particularly impulsive guy...

Here is a sample of projects currently underway or recently completed. Click on the item for details.

• Innovative disease management company optimizes "Product to Market" process

  If you're a registered Affiliate you can view current project openings in iCenter. If you're not an affiliate and would like to be considered for membership, please send your resume to andrea.smith@intervoxgroup.com.

  [more projects]

By Richard A. Fredrickson
Executive Advocate

As an Affiliate of Intervox, you may frequently be faced with a client that knows it NEEDS to enhance its level of service to its customers, but they don't have a clear plan on WHERE to start the process. As a practitioner in this business for many years, I have compiled some approaches and topics for discussion that may assist you in helping the client to formulate their plans and get off on the right track with their customer experience improvement projects...

Rick Wilminko
Director, Infrastructure

As Director of Infrastructure for InterVox Group, my role is to design, implement, and maintain those areas that help support the virtual workspace of our Affiliate Network. So what does that mean in real terms? InterVox Group's office is not in a single location. It is made up of a combination of "home offices" located across the US.

Before I get into what makes up the InterVox Group Infrastructure let me provide you with how I got involved with this team. Like many of you, I consider myself an independent consultant...

Here's an interesting item from the May issue of Business 2.0 that shows a more broad-based application of our approach to collaboration. The fact that we're highly focused on customer contact centers makes for potentially very powerful application of the principle that "one man's trash is another man's treasure".

"Even when salespeople are in the right place at the right time, they're not always selling the right product. A San Francisco startup called InnerSell is solving that problem with a variation on social networking that pays salespeople for making virtual introductions. Say a rep peddles PCs, but his client is currently in need of printers. He can join InnerSell.com for free and find a printer vendor. If his client buys from that vendor, the rep gets a commission (typically about 10 percent).

"Though online business networking is nothing new, InnerSell and upstart Jigsaw are the first to actually pay people for their connections. Founded in 2002, InnerSell secured a promise of $1 million from venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in 2004, and some 1,000 salespeople have already joined. Let the virtual schmoozing begin."

As part of the InterVox Group network of Affiliates, you can also "monetize the handshake", by listening for stranded opportunities and working through the network to help a client, a prospect, or a business contact. It's easy. Give us a call and we'll help you get started.

Free Trouble Ticket Software

This month The Tool Exchange has found a browser-based ticket tracking tool that can be applied equally well to software bug tracking, customer support, personal project task management and your to-do lists. It is an impressively scalable solution as well, and can grow in both database power and number of users as an operation expands. It will be particularly useful to a new or small call center that cannot justify a six figure problem management suite. Here is the link to this free tool: Free Trouble Ticket Software.

Our thanks to Steve Murtagh for this month's contribution.

If you have a favorite application or trick of the trade that you'd like to share with the Affiliate community, let us know at toolx@intervoxgroup.com . The only requirement is that submissions be in the public domain, and, naturally, we will let your fellow Affiliates know whom to thank.

We welcome your contributions to help make iLink a valuable resource for our fast growing community of contact center professionals.

If you have original articles, case studies, white papers or other interesting material you'd like to share, please submit it to ilink@intervoxgroup.com .

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© 2005 Intervox Group Inc.