Am I ready for the future?

About three years ago I was in a business communications class. I was put on a team that had to write a paper about how technology was changing business communications. I remember that part of the paper was on Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP). As I wrote the paper I thought to myself, "like I will ever use this crazy futuristic technology." Well, I have now used VOIP.

It all started with the amount of phone calls I took at work. I am a billing manager at a growing utility billing company. We have a huge focus on Customer service and so we do not have a phone trees or any of that "push 1 for balance" crap. Every person who calls in during business hours should get a live person right away. We are still growing and so our customer service department is not able to answer every call that comes in. So how do you insure that people calling in get a live person when the customer service department can't answer every call? You get the billing managers to take calls on top of all their other responsibilities.

I knew this when I got the job, and I was fine with it for the most part. I was told that I would start out at the bottom of the billing manager phone que and I would move up the que as more people were hired under me. My first few months everything went according to plan, but then I started to get more calls than when I first started. It wasn't just me, everyone was taking more calls.

The next few months were filled with a lot of discord between the billing department and the customer service department. We insisted that they were not taking as many calls as they said they were and they maintained that they were taking plenty of calls. Finally we discovered that the phone tracking software itself was inaccurate.

So then the company decided to buy new phones. All the old traditional phones with receivers would be replaced with new headset phones that are connected to the computers. I was not too happy about that announcement. I didn't want to wear a headset. But really what could I do? I wanted to take less calls, but the old system couldn't tell the company how many calls I was taking. Finally I accepted my fate.

The IT department officially hooked up my phone today. I was pretty ornery about it. As one of the IT guys explained how my new phone worked I kept making comments about how the soft phone on my monitor was going to take up important space. I joked that I would need another monitor (I already have two). I said I probably wasn't technologically competent enough for this system. I asked how I was expected use a phone on my computer when my computer usually froze during the busy billing days. Basically I was trying to make the IT guy as miserable as I was.

Well you know what? The IT guy understood that I was just anxious about the change. He explained the truth about each of my concerns. He showed me that the soft phone really wouldn't be on my screen much so I wouldn't need to worry about it taking up space. He assured me the system was easy and that in a week I would feel like I had always been using it. And he told me that the company had changed our band width to handle the VOIP system.

He was so positive about the change that I got all excited to get on the phone. When I took my first call everything went fine. It actually was really nice to have my hands free while I talked on the phone. About the only thing that was odd was that the call felt really surreal since I wasn't holding a receiver. So I guess I will get used to this. It is kind of odd to have to dial with my mouse on the monitor on the soft phone. But I will get used to it. And if I am lucky the company will soon know how many Customer Service Reps to hire so I can take less calls.