Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Background:

Acme Corp is a small manufacturer of baby toys in the US. They are headquartered in San Antonio, Texas with a second small office in India. The San Antonio office employs 40 staff and provides its customers with a critical support line (CSL) to call to report important problems with their toys or to get information on potential toy recalls. Over the last year, Acme has been expanding sales in the US and Europe. Because of this, Acme corp is experiencing an increase in calls to their CSL that are coming outside of their standard US operating hours of 8AM-5PM Central Time. The CEO of Acme Corp has decided to rent a small office in India and hire 2 call agents to work in that office and provide extended hours phone support for the CSL. The IT department has already completed integration of the WAN between the new India office and the San Antonio headquarters. Primary Internet is fed into the San Antonio office and provided to the India office via the existing WAN connection. No phone lines or voip services have been purchased.


Problem Scenario/Requirements:

  1. From the hours of 5AM-8PM CST, all calls to the CSL are to be answered in the US by a 4 agent team. Outside of these hours, calls to the critical support line are to be answered by the India office's 2 agent team.

  2. The CEO has requested that this be done in the most cost effective way posible while still meeting the other requirements.

  3. The solution must be tolerant of a WAN link failure between sites.

  4. The solution must be tolerant of a loss of Internet connectivity or a primary Telco failure in San Antonio (not both).

  5. Any callers waiting to speak with an agent during the answering shift from US to India (morning or evening) must be seemlessly shifted to the other answering team.

  6. All calls inbound to the CSL (and only the CSL) must be recorded. When agents make outbound calls, these should not be recorded. This functionality must be automatic and require no special intervention by the agent.

  7. No voicemail is to be used for the CSL. Calls must be answered or held until an agent is available. Individual agents are permitted to have voicemail boxes.

  8. The solution must support at least 12 concurrent calls to the CSL and be easily scalable.

Have fun!

Submit your solution as a comment. I have to release comments for posting so I will hold them until the 2 weeks is up. You can post questions if you want and I will answer and post for all to read during the 2 weeks, but I would like to keep questons to a minimum and base the solution off the info you see. Don't ask me "what I am looking for" for a particular item. That's up to you!

Happy 3CXing!!!!

Best,

Mike

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