phyllostachys 55: Minute Tech 40 show notes

40 - How Do I Track Those Calls?

Good morning, this is Alex Landefeld with episode 40 of the Minute Tech podcast -

coming to you for Thursday, November 29th , 2007

On this tech podcast about the broader meanings of technology, we'll mention:

- AT&T - did they deep-six iPhone sales for the holidays?
- How Do I Track Those Calls?
- Yahoo's Experts get slammed.

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Minute Tech podcast is brought to you in part by:

Larry Tolbert's Sunday Morning Wu Style Taiji - 9:30 every Sunday morning at the Dunamis Baptist Church, in Wilkinsburg, PA.
"Move with the motion of the planet - move with Taiji" - e-mail leonardtolbert-[at]-hotmail-[dot]-com for more info.

And:

Ravelings, by Carol. Pittsburgh-region classes in needle-craft - encompassing crochet, embroidery, knitting, & tatting, as well as an associated lace collection. For more information, contact Carol at carolb207@alltel.net.


Tech News:

Bloomberg reports today that AT&T's chief Randall Stephenson has let the apple out of the bag by saying that Apple will be releasing a 3G-capable iPhone in 2008. Granted, Stephenson is not an Apple employee and is therefore perhaps not subject to the purported reality distortion field...but don't you think he'd consider it wise to not let this information slip until after the Holiday buying season? C'mon now, really!

Interestingly, yesterday evenings roundup from thestreet dot com, Cramer's "Recap: Gone Bottom Fishin'"....Cramer is talkin all about going by his 1990 playbook and buying up financial sector stocks such as Citi Group and Goldman Sachs. He states that in 1990 Prince Alwaleed of Saudi Arabia bought a stake in Citi, and that now, in 2007, an investment fund from Abu Dhabi is buying a similar stake in Citi. So, we're talking about bottom fishing. Remember folks....bottom fishing. In the very next breath...or paragraph...Cramer says oh, yeah, and also buy some Apple, RIM and Google. Are these bottom fishing stocks? Perhaps after the recent pullback, they are...but during the pullback would have been the opportune time to sing the buying song. Note that with Apple, pullbacks only seem to last a week or two...then something pushes Apple back up to new highs.

And the most recent bit of news - Pittsburgh software and podcast hosting company Wizzard Software's CFO John Busshaus was named Pittsburgh CFO of the year by the Pittsburgh Business Times. Narrowed down from a group of fellow nominees, Busshaus was noted for having "guided the company through four successful acquisitions in less than one year, as well as two capital raises (private placements) worth approximately $10M".

A link to the related article is in the show notes: Wizzard CFO Busshaus


Tech Question:

The tech question for today, related to the Help Desk call theme this week, is: "How Do I Track Those Calls?".

When taking calls and helping people resolve their various issues, whether it's dealing with a product from your company, or a document that their trying to type up, or a random object for which you're rendering help, it's good to have ways to identify the caller so that you can both track the progress of their issue, and later you can extract data about their call to provide call analysis for the management of your organization, to show the effectiveness of your service.

How do you track this information?

Well, you can use paper tablets, just writing down the information...and after a month of writing, you have a pile of paper tablets with gobs of information that you cannot readily access.

A slightly better solution is to use tabulated paper sheets, with categorized information boxes in which you can write down the caller's details. This format allows for some categorization of information...but still requires later data entry into a spreadsheet program to allow for analysis.

An infinitely better solution is to just enter information as it comes in into a spreadsheet program, such as Excel, Open Office, Apple's Numbers or Google's Spreadsheet. This way the information is in a ready format to be crunched at day, week or month-end. With this you can analyze for duration of calls, types of calls, geographic location of callers, and, with a bit of metadata about each caller, the product or systems that seem to be exhibiting the most calls.

The next step up is to have a database back end with a dataentry front end. The database will have far more capacity for information entered, will likely have more multi-user ability if you have multiple people taking calls, will probably be added to nightly server backup schedules, should your back end servers lose power, and allow for front-end calculations to show data analysis to both the call reception staff as well as the management, with built in business logic/programming.


Podcasting - Blogging News:

As I use many of the major "portals" for news: news.google.com for general, business and science headlines, and Yahoo's finance site for finance news and research, I tend to see the posts by Yahoo Finance's various "Expert" columnists, Penelope Trunk, Suze Orman, Robert Kiyosaki and Ben Stein, to name a few.

These columnists have very good columns on everything from personal finance to leadership to stock picks. To write this sort of thing, you have to be either living in the thought clouds or surrounded in part by those who are, so that you can either draw from examples of things you see around you or write from personal experience. Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher from 2,600 years ago, a contemporary of Confucious (Kung Fu Tzu), wrote some pretty amazing head-in-the-clouds things about leadership, character and general outlook in his Tao Te Ching verses. Do you think he worked in kitchens or dug ditches or waited tables through his life? Not likely.

In order to have people who write good articles, or philosophical treatises, you have to allow for them to have slightly higher existences than we do. If they then choose to contribute their up and down wisdom to the web-aether, and we who are far lower benefit from their writings, so much the better for civilization. I'm referring to all of this because Ben Stein and Rob Kiyosaki have had some pretty negative comments written in response to their recent articles. Comments are good...and we need to support the freedom to always be able to comment on other's writings...but many of these have been strident criticism of the foundations that have brought these various columnists forward. I, for one, am very thankful that they are taking the time to spill part of their souls onto digital paper for the benefit of others. And if they reap an outsize monetary benefit from this....well then, perhaps we each need to take a hint and start thinking, writing and publishing for the good of our peers.

Thats all for today on Minute Tech podcast.
you can reach me at minutetech@gmail.com -
and my blog is at minutetech.blogspot.com

"Move with the motion of the planet - move with Taiji"

- AT&T - did they deep-six iPhone sales for the holidays?
- How Do I Track Those Calls?
- Yahoo's Experts get slammed.

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