What do you want next?

Before we begin, here's what's happening this week:

Office Hours

A weekly meeting with Call Theory and fellow customers to learn, ask questions, and network over general IT, call center, and Amtelco topics.

• Tuesday, 9/3 @ 3pm Eastern (today!)
• Zoom Link and additional information
• Topics - Contextual database analysis for snaps/call storage

Scripting Sessions

A weekly meeting to train Amtelco Intelligent Series scripting topics from Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced topics on a repeating schedule.

• Thursday, 9/5 @ 12pm Eastern
• Zoom Link and additional information
• Topics - Advanced III: MergeComm

Pick A Feature

Which of the following items would you like to see introduced into the Call Theory Mission Control Utility dashboard? In no particular order...

• Archiving/Purging Management for Amtelco Intelligent Series & Genesis
• Customer Web Portal for Amtelco Intelligent Series & Genesis
• Call Statistics & Billing for Amtelco Genesis systems

Once decided, we're probably 3-4 months away from initial implementation. You can help speed that up by subscribing to any Call Theory plan!

Archiving & Purging Management

Moving from Infinity to Genesis can be fairly shocking when comparing the database size changes needed to store screen-captures and call recordings in the database instead of directly onto disk (whatever happened to FILESTREAM support, Amtelco?)

Customers reported 90% of the database size is snaps/recordings and it's prohibitive to store long-periods because the size of the database grows too large for the tools available to us via backups, security, recoverability time, and pricing.

Imagine something like this:

• Archive statistics, messages, call recordings, and screen-captures to almost any storage target, including filesystems, database engines, and cloud storage.
• Data is routinely horizontally scaled (i.e., stored by Year or similar) and queries automatically include scaled storage.
• Purge the data regularly and automatically to keep the Amtelco database storage size within acceptable parameters and provide an http webhook for health-monitoring.
• Encrypt and decrypt data at the application level and shard or backup data across multiple providers with different keys.
• A web application to manage access, search, and retrieve the data as needed.
• Express links to share with customers to access archival requests
• Robust monitoring and activity tracking to provide billable stats for providing archived data to your customers

Customer Web Portal

Essentially, an unofficial multi-tenant web portal compatible with the Amtelco Intelligent ecosystem (including Genesis) to allow customers the following abilities:

• Modern security and SSO support
• Utilize a well-documented permission system
• View (basic) call statistics and messages for your account(s)
• Execute and view Crystal Reports
• Add, remove, and update directory listings
• Schedule and manage on-call schedules and shifts
• Upload custom data for use by your agents in call scripting
• No additional licensing needed.

Call Statistics & Billing

Over the years, I've been approached by 4 or 5 companies asking me to build something to handle billing in some form. The requests usually broke down to something like this:

• It needs all the price manipulation techniques our industry is known for using: progressive pricing, time and/or day multipliers, holiday multipliers, 15/30/60 second rounding, etc., etc.
• The manipulated pricing details need to be readily re-creatable so customers and internal staff don't see differences between billed-data and raw call-data.
• The billed-data should be integrated into something like Stripe, QuickBooks, or similar interface to actually handle the invoicing and sending to customer.

This is a pretty big task because Amtelco does not provide official, standardized formulas. Everyone either uses the built-in Crystal Reports (which if you view source, aren't consistent themselves) or determined their own formulas based on how their business works.

So we have to create the formula/definitions, make them editable/adjustable, create an entire reporting suite to use our formulas for the call center side of things, and then integrate that into an export for compatible billing systems for the invoice side of things. (Then what do customers use for self-reporting? Probably need that, too.)

So, which will it be?

Again, I'm looking for your feedback to help decide what's the most important for next steps. I have a few features to finish and bugs to stomp but we'll be ramping up one of these before the end of the year.

The question is, which will it be? Hit reply and let me know your thoughts.

Paying customer feedback is typically a higher priority in our feedback cycle.