streamWrite Blog

Meet the Developers

Arthi, Reza, Stephanie, Joseph and Mark make up the software development team. Between us we have decades of experience in software development, particularly in the areas of web development (full stack), database development, self service (IVR, IWR, interactive texting), speech applications, security, PCI compliance and much more.

We also have experience in document programming using PDFs and Microsoft's XML OpenDocument Format.

And while you're at it...

Meet the rest of the technical team at ATI: Tony, Craig, James and Aaron round out our networking, provisioning, installation and support services. This team brings a high-level of knowledge across a broad array of services and technologies and will be there to support your system in the areas defined in this paragraph.

And our project management and business analyst team: Minh, Meredith, Robin and Dave. This talented group will keep your project on track and information flowing to all of the appropriate parties. If you have a project  in process you should have a project manager assigned. Although in some instances where a project is small it may be managed by our support desk.

While software developers are great at writing code, they do not have the day to day skills to deal with other things like server provisioning and technical problems, routing issues, security, encryption and other non-software development tasks.

But you just want to meet with one of us....

The problem with software developers is that they need to spend a majority of their time, head down, writing software. The more uninterrupted time writing code, the better for everybody! This is why software developers may not be responsive to emails, meeting requests and answering the phone.

The best way to reach anybody for a support issue or technical request is to follow the proper communication channel for the request at hand. Follow this list to find the right person for your needs:

• New system requests or requests to make significant changes to an existing system:
  • In this event, please contact your ATI account executive / sales representative. This person will definitely get you moving in the right direction on a new request.
• Current project in process:
  • If you have a project in process now  you should have a project manager assigned to it. Please do send all new requests on your project directly to your project manager who will get the request to the right person quickly.
• Service related request:
  • Always reach out to our tech support department with any service requests. Please note, if you have an urgent issue please call it in. Sending the request by email directly to technical staff who are not watching for new requests could create a significant delay in getting your problem addressed.
• When in doubt:
  • If you are just not sure who to contract, please do reach out to tech support. They will be available to address your concern, and if necessary, hand you off to the right person.

In summary, by following the correct channels it should not be hard getting the support you need. But, if you do have concerns feel free to escalate to ATI management or your ATI account executive.

Serving Customers

Pete Peterson 9/12/2018

It’s the single most important job of any business. And the most challenging.

 A balancing game exists today for companies to both serve customers in a personal and careful manner, and to lower the costs of doing so. Sending a customer away feeling that they were helped in a way that saved them time and solved their problem can be achieved through many different approaches. The easy answer is to always have a live agent, ready, and available without an extended wait. This was the gold standard for decades – “I’m here, I’m on the phone, and I’m ready to help you now”.

The pendulum swung to automation starting in the 80s, and peaking in the late 90s with systems that encouraged customers to forgo live help and retrieve information automatically, first through IVR and later through web, email and most lately Text/SMS. Early on, this was seen by the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers and GenX’ers as impersonal and unhelpful. In the early days of automation, they were spot-on right about this in most cases. Early ventures into automation was done in a way that often forced callers to navigate endless IVR menus and questions, entering account information repeatedly - finding that in the end, they needed to still talk to someone and then wait in an extended queue since the provider was banking on automation to lower their FTE headcount. Automation got a really bad name during those years.

 Fast forward to the ‘00s – The web is fully part of our lives. The fore mentioned generations have now joined their Millennial kids in accepting automation as convenient and a valid alternative to a live agent – at least in web form. I took a few years for IVR to catch up.

 It was in these years that ATI began to re-think IVR. How can we design IVR in a way that doesn’t drag callers through piles of menus asking multiple questions that don’t apply to most customers? The answer: Context Sensitive IVR. Imagine that you know a lot about the customer -- who’s calling. You wouldn’t offer nearly as many menu options or branches to someone if you know where they stood with the provider. For example, instead of reading a list of 10 options like Payment, balance, address correction, etc., we might start out with a special context for this customer because they have a credit amount on their account. We might identify a customer that cannot be handled automatically because of their status, and vector them into a special agent queue for that particular status. We might make special offers to this client based on their previous buying habits. All of this can be done as long as we first identify the caller with an account number or caller ID.

As we moved on into the new millennium, other channels became available that followed the same benefits of context sensitive scripting – integrated WEB, SMS and IVR lend themselves well to a cross-platform approach that blends live telephone agents and chat help.

ATI’s PORTALS platform is the product of these decades of experience with customers and clients, and has played a major role in Corporations, Medicine, Universities, government and courts interfacing with their callers and customers.

The new frontier of customer service will encompass AI, WEB RTC and other new tools and protocols – and PORTALS will be there – connecting customers and solving problems.