Luckily, I’m not doing a technical edit, only a copyedit, on the document that makes this claim:
I’m not an ICT person at all, this is way outside my area of expertise. So maybe the above claim is quite rational. But it sounds lame to me. If it is, I want to bring it to my client’s attention.
All thoughts welcome; it’s a couple of days until I’ll be going back to the client with this.
I am not too familiar with the subject either, but I think the claim is referring to the fact that call centers are typically equipped for communicating with multiple people at the same time. There’s very little theoretical difference in function between say a police dispatch and a call center – the differences are practical of how and why it is accessed. I am not sure why a call center would have an SMS server though.
Groman … I bet the SMS she’s referring to is Short Message Service, i.e. cellphone text messaging, not Microsoft Systems Management Server.
Any place that can send outgoing email can send SMS.
For example, in the US you send an email to 1234567890@sprintpcs.com to cause that message to be transmuted to an SMS and appear on the Sprint phone whose number is (123) 456-7890. I beleive it’s 1234567890@att.net for AT&T & 1234567890@verizon.net for Verizon subscribers. The point being, it doesn’t require anything special at the sending end; the cellphone people handle all the tricky part of getting the data to the cell phone.
Back to the OP, my question would be how much does Egypt really have a call center industry. And if it does, what (human) languages does it support?
Using SMS as a business tool makes a lot of sense. Involving a call center makes no sense at all. If my business needs to contact my truck driver Abdul, I can either send him an email that appears on his phone as an SMS, or I can call or message the call center, which in turn will send the email on my behalf. Now why would that make any sense?
Perhaps if businesses with field forces in your part of the world can’t get effective high speed internet connections, they’d have to effectively rent it from the call center people by telephoning them & having them enter the email. Still, that seems really inefficient, even by the difficult standards of the Third World.
I could also see subcontracting the whole shebang, where I send the daily work schedule to the call center every morning and they are responsible for contacting the workers to give them their assignments, and the workers call the center back when done to get their next job.
Bottom line: not knowing the larger context of your paragraph fragment, it sorta sounds like meaningless marketing puffery to me. Not strictly false, just irrelevant and ultimately uninformative.
“Thanks to it’s sunny climate, Egypt is perfect for making raisins” Well, yes, but do they grow grapes anywhere within a thousand miles, or does any country nearby import raisins? And does Egypt’s extra sunniness versus say, England, make for better raisins, or merely burned up dessicated leathery ones?
No no I realize that, but how do you think the computer at Sprint that receives an e-mail at 1234567890@sprintpcs.com forwards it to their CDMA/PCS network to the number 1234567890 as an SMS? Using provider-specific e-mail gateways is not a standard practice for SMS in commerce. Surprisingly, a lot of companies that use SMS internally use a computer connected to a specialized device (or just a cell phone modem) with a SIM card in it that it uses to send/receive SMS.
When I said “SMS Server” I meant a server that would be used by call center employees to send/receive SMS from their workstations, which indeed would be strange, but that was the only way I could visualize a “call center infrastructure” being any more conducive to SMS than a dentists office or a lavatory.
I learn something new every day. I’m sorry to have insulted your expertise. I knew that cell providers had specialized gear to put the email into SMS format & forward it into phone-space. I’d never heard of anyone else doing that directly versus just firing SMTP emails at the relevant provider.
Actually, now that you bring it up, I have a need for something like an SMS server to resolve a weakness in one of our products. Do you know of any particular brands? My google-fu turned up a bunch of service providers, but I’d rather have a box, or better yet, a software package I could install & then use its API as a gateway to/from the SMS world.
No apology is necessary since I don’t have expertise in the subject. Just memory for geeky stuff I suppose. I don’t know of any specific brands, but take a look at the list of links at the bottom of this Wikipedia page.
The one that jumped out at me as neat isSMS Foxbox.
Cool. Thanks.
Thanks everyone. It’s a pretty arcane question, even for the generous standards of the SDMB, I suppose.
Anyway, Egypt does have a surprisingly well-developed call center industry. But I’ve always thought of call centers as being best designed to support companies with a ginormous customer base that will have a high volume of calls with repetitive content – a credit card company or software company, for example.
But “field services” sounds like small potatoes to me – even a large company surely can’t have THAT many field workers, and if they do, why not just train 'em/give them access to mobile technology that will directly answer their questions, instead of setting up an entire call center to support them?
I’m leaning toward the “puffery” theory proposed by LSLGuy, myself. I think I’ll mention this to my client.