Seeing as how most of this week was spent getting Randy, my new "rock star" call center agent, ready for battle, I thought it would be informative to share with you the tools he uses to do what he does. I've tried to break this out between hard things, soft things that have to be installed and soft things that are accessed through a browser. My personal bias and preference, and one I hope to develop in the book, is to do all soft things through a browser.

Basic Hardware and Infrastructure

• a workspace. In this case, a private 3 X 3 meter cubicle in a large room of other agents working for various other businesses in North America and England
• a desk. In this case, a standard sized office desk
• a computer. In this case, Randy has a Pentium 4 machine with 512K of RAM and a 17" monitor
• a headset. Randy uses a relatively inexpensive USB headset. It is provided by the call center.

Software Applications

• Operating system. Microsoft XP
• Administrative Applications. Office XP. In particular, Outlook for email, Word for collaborative documents such as call scripts and instructions that I provide. Since some of the documents I provide are in Adobe PDF format, Randy also needed to install Adobe Reader
• Browser. Internet Explorer 7.0 and Firefox 1.5
• Internet messaging / voice chat. We use Skype to communicate with one another
• Telecommunications. The call center Randy works in uses a VOIP system called Five9.

Software Services

• CRM. I use a CRM application by CRMASP. Lots more on this in another post.
• Email. As a backup, Randy has a Yahoo email account.
• Google. The list of prospects is not always complete. From time to time, the agent will need to go to a company website to find a telephone number.