A start-up’s “reality point”

Now that I am finally past the business planning stage, I am finding this next step particularly difficult. This is the stage of a start-up business I call the reality point. The reality point is that point in time when you are officially a business. For some, this might be when the first customer walks through the door, or perhaps when you get your first online customer. Either way, it is that milestone event which marks the end of theory and the beginning of reality.

My new business is called Giddyup. We will provide small building contractors with back-office and business development services such as call-center, bookkeeping, marketing, management, etc. My reality point will come when my the first homeowner (my customer’s customer) calls in for service, and our operator fulfills their need.

Having a reality point helps prioritize tasks. Before I can answer that first phone call we need to make decisions on call-center systems. We need to be able to access the customer account, so buying decisions need to be made for a contact manager, schedule, and bookkeeping software/service. Once these decisions are made and the software is installed and configured, we need to import existing customer data from our clients various hodge-podge of systems. Of course these expenditures need to be documented in order to present to my seed investor.

So, having a milestone event set to a date has been very useful in helping me focus on prioritizing tasks. For Giddyup, the big day is Friday June 15th, 2007. Don’t expect any blogs that week.

Contact Center

So I’m currently starting up a company and need to set up a small (5 seat) call center. One of the first things I have found in my research is that the scope of call centers have expanded, and they are now called contact centers. This accounts for the integration of email, and web chat to the traditional phone connections. The other big dynamic is the extensive use of VoIP. Using voice over IP not only removes the long-distance charges from the equation, but more important it drastically improves CTI or Computer Telephony Integration. Customer contacts require quick and convenient access to customer records. VoIP makes things such as screen pops, and historical contact automation much easier.

Just as the web evened the playing field ten years ago, products such as Customer Interaction Center from Interactive Intelligence promise to do the same for the call … I mean contact center.

I’m getting a demo on this product tomorrow, and will follow-up with my impression, but from what I’ve seen on their web site, it’s pretty amazing. It appears that their hosted service offers variable pricing for what might otherwise be a heavy six figure investment. Essentially all services are provided over your internet connection via a web interface. Phone calls are routed to a SIP phone which you buy and plug into your PC’s USB interface. What this means is that you can station a call … I mean contact center employee wherever there’s a high-speed internet connection. I suspect this is similar to the technology that Jet Blue uses to keep its work-from-home ticket agents productive.

The administrative interface appears to have all of the advances agent tracking features of a high-end, in-house Lucent or Nortel system. This would of course be very important to

My challenge over the next couple of weeks:

• Is this contact center solution as good as it sounds?
• What is the cost structure?
• What exactly is involved in getting my client phones ringing on my agents’ SIP phones.
• What is the best web based/enabled software for small business CRM and accounting?