Call Center Wallboard Displays/TV's
Call Center Wallboard Displays/TV's
(OP)
Hello all -
we've come to a point in our call center where management wants to have BCMSvu data displayed on TV's on the walls in our call center. We currently have only supervisor PC's loaded with the BCMSvu application, and this would allow supervisors to walk around and help the call center be more productive while still being able to see the status of their employees. In addition, the employees could watch their progress as well.
My question is:
Is anybody out there doing something similar to this? We've been brainstorming on everyway possible to do this, and think using TV's on the wall hooked up to computers running specific windows displaying specific data is the best way. Wireless is not an option, nor are Wallboards because the supervisors need a list of all employees (about 35) displayed at the same time for quick reference on their call status.
Any ideas, tips, suggestions, comments or real-world applications of something like this you guys can think of would be GREATLY appreciated. Unfortunately, we cannot write a program to do this like we would want to. Ideally - we were thinking of an app written in assembler that pipes through a Linux box that would display only what we want from a RAW data collection in the switch (or something like this) - but this is not an option.
Lastly - we need to implement this next to immediately, so Im grabbing at straws here. :)
Thanks again guys!
we've come to a point in our call center where management wants to have BCMSvu data displayed on TV's on the walls in our call center. We currently have only supervisor PC's loaded with the BCMSvu application, and this would allow supervisors to walk around and help the call center be more productive while still being able to see the status of their employees. In addition, the employees could watch their progress as well.
My question is:
Is anybody out there doing something similar to this? We've been brainstorming on everyway possible to do this, and think using TV's on the wall hooked up to computers running specific windows displaying specific data is the best way. Wireless is not an option, nor are Wallboards because the supervisors need a list of all employees (about 35) displayed at the same time for quick reference on their call status.
Any ideas, tips, suggestions, comments or real-world applications of something like this you guys can think of would be GREATLY appreciated. Unfortunately, we cannot write a program to do this like we would want to. Ideally - we were thinking of an app written in assembler that pipes through a Linux box that would display only what we want from a RAW data collection in the switch (or something like this) - but this is not an option.
Lastly - we need to implement this next to immediately, so Im grabbing at straws here. :)
Thanks again guys!
Pbxman
Systems Administrator
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RE: Call Center Wallboard Displays/TV's
Also you could use regular wallboards.
Now I know these options are not cheap, and you probarbly would not have them fast, have you looked in to VuStat buttons on the phone sets.
You can do a lot with those...
Please let me know if the information that was provided is helpfull.
Edwin Plat
A.K.A. Europe
RE: Call Center Wallboard Displays/TV's
We hooked-up a 27-inch TV to a computer with TV-out and ran the BCMSvu app, and it works pretty well. We think we are going to install 4 TV's on the walls with 4 computers running BCMSvu for the entire call-center to see at quick-glance. So far - thats the only way it will work unless there is some Lucent wireless device that would work...but we doubt thats an option at this point.
Thanks for the feedback, Europe.
Pbxman
Systems Administrator
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RE: Call Center Wallboard Displays/TV's
RE: Call Center Wallboard Displays/TV's
Currently - our proposed solution would cost $3500 for the TV's, Computers, and mounting hardware to put the TV's on the wall. The budget allows for around $8K for a solution.
Im really starting to think our current solution (with the TVs) is the only way to do it quickly and cheaply. I have to purchase today to have it all installed and working by the 14th.
Thanks again for all your help guys.
Pbxman
Systems Administrator
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RE: Call Center Wallboard Displays/TV's
-Filakio
RE: Call Center Wallboard Displays/TV's
We're going for basically the same thing as in the airport flight terminals..screens that show arrival times, departure times, etc...but instead of that - displaying the BCMSvu agent data so anyone could easily see it.
Pbxman
Systems Administrator
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RE: Call Center Wallboard Displays/TV's
You could use the Netmeeting Idea for employees stationary PC's and offer Supervisors wireless networked PDA's.
VLG711
RE: Call Center Wallboard Displays/TV's
We looked into that wireless option, but were unable to come up with software that would allow BCMSvu to run on them. We looked into IPAQs and Sony slim laptops, but the Windows CE platform is incompatible with BCMSvu.
Has anyone tried this, or knows of some other way supervisors could see the BCMSvu data on a wireless PDA? They didnt want to lug around laptops all day, so the PDA option is the only wireless option we can think of.
Thanks again for all the input guys/gals!
Pbxman
Systems Administrator
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RE: Call Center Wallboard Displays/TV's
We have a kind of similar set up here. We have a 650 seat call centre, rectangular in shape with a main sales floor on the ground and an upper floor with an centre atrium looking down onto the main floor below.
We have 8 large 50inch plasma screen TVs (very large!) positioned on the wall at each corner of both floors.
We have a PC running CentreVu supervisor and during the busy periods we put a graphical queue dislay on the screens to create a sense of urgency among the agents and give visible info about queues on all the key skills.
From what you say I think that the only way forward for you would be to split the info you need into two categories, queue volumes and agent status.
We tried putting the agent status info on the TVs but to be honest it didnt work because it was too small to read from any distance. Our Team Leader PCs have the centrevu app installed and they use this to monitor agent activity. Another key element which we have introduced is that we have a CMS control desk which is always manned and their job is to watch CMS and call agents to challenge why they are on after call or any other aux state. They also alert designated TLs in each business area using DECT phones which allow the TLs still to be able to walk but CMS control alert them to any problems or excessive queues.
Another way you could possibly do it would be to use a restricted terminal emulation to allow agents and possibly even TLs via PDAs to be able to get a real time window displaying a machine running the necessary reports.
If you used BCMS on a terminal server, you could have a large amount of connections feeding into one box, all displaying their own version of the app.
I hope these bits of info are helpful!
Please let me know if I can be of any further help.
John
RE: Call Center Wallboard Displays/TV's
We started looking for other solutions for wallboards, and are currently evaluating Symon Communications MySymon (www.symon.com) and Target Vision. Both are server based solutions that interface with the ACD and then communicate to wallboards / tvs / web servers with call statistic information. Symon looks the best to me so far. The communication to the wallboards from the server is all IP, so no serial communication to worry about (ie support. Remember soldering custom db15 connections? Yuk!) The price isn't cheap, we'll probably end up spending $20K for a 300 person call center.
RE: Call Center Wallboard Displays/TV's
PC had BCMS-Vu (It was really another application, but who cares) and a video card that supported NTSC output. I ran the output of the PC video card into a cable TV distribution amplifer. I had a fairly fancy one. I had 4 "internal" tv channels, Agent stats, company messages, inbound billing, collection etc. I could select what channel would be output to the TV's on the amp. I had 4 amps and sent out channels 2, 3, 4, and 5. From the output of the amp I ran RG6AU coax to all the TV's in the building. I had approximately 30 TV's so the amp's I had to use were not low end, apprx $ 900.00 per amp as I recall. User could turn to the specific channel they needed for their needs.
Depending on the number of TV's you want, a lower cost solution could be this.
PC with scan converter connected. I would NOT buy a low end scan converter, support for 1024 X 768 would be preffered. Any lower and the resolution would be poor to the monitors. Any way I digress, Take the coax output of the scan converter and run it to a Radio Shack cable booster ($20.00). Run the output of the booster to you TV's and you have yourself a handy dandy system. I would only use RG6AU coax for best performance. Hope this helped.
Chris
RE: Call Center Wallboard Displays/TV's
Our centre is really big though, you would struggle to make out people from one end to the other, maybe you are working in a smaller place?
With regards to the terminal server side, you could use a basic PC just running CMS and install a more simple Terminal emulation on it such as WinVNC? Set the emulation to read only and you'd be sorted. Maybe?
RE: Call Center Wallboard Displays/TV's
We are going to go with a 2-TV setup (about 40 agents in this room of our call center)..TV on each end of the call center. We only have BCMSvu to use, so i hope its enough to do that.
I have 2 PC's each with geForce MX400 videocards with NTSC S-Video out that can be used for this project. I would technically like to have a channel for each window of our ACD groups..it so happens that we have 4 ACD groups in this part of the call center. If i could even get 2 channels to work, it would free-up that much more space on screen. Currently, all we can do is use 800x600 resolution to display 2 ACD groups on a 27-inch TV. Management is actually satisfied with this - but i think it looks horrible..;) I know it can be done better.
Clausen - where can I get this scan converter? Is that similar to a line-doubler, or basically a device that increases resolution? If i cant get the multiple channels working (im still not sure how i could do that), i'd at least like to increase the TV resolution from 800x600 out of my videocard to 1024x768.
You guy's are awesome - thanks again for any help!
Pbxman
Systems Administrator
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RE: Call Center Wallboard Displays/TV's
This then gets fed through a video matrix which means we can connect any output to any or all of the TVs. Means we can have the Text on one screen, and CMS one another etc.
Glad this was of some help!
Cheers
John
RE: Call Center Wallboard Displays/TV's
Don't you hate it when you cobble something together and management actually likes it, but you spend three months on something and they take one look at it and hate it?
-- Charles