Rick McFarland, CEO of Voice4Net,
Turns Call Center Nightmares into Dreams Come True

After over three decades in customer service, telecom entrepreneur Rick McFarland, CEO of Voice4Net, keeps on his mission to turn call center nightmares into dreams come true via his “custom boutique” interactive software solutions.    

            Growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, Rick McFarland learned an important corollary to the traditional “Golden Rule” about treating people the way you want to be treated. Later coining it the “Platinum Rule,” it’s an ethic which says to treat people the way they want to be treated—and the foundation of his successful 30 year plus career as a software developer and entrepreneur dedicated to helping companies better serve their customers and enhance the customer service experience.

            Twenty five years after making his mark in the telecom industry developing one of the first voice automatic banking applications for credit unions, McFarland, CEO of Voice4Net, is still on a singular mission to create what should be the simplest--yet is often one of the most elusive—achievements in daily American life: a pleasant caller experience for both the customers and the customer service staff.

            Employing their trademark custom interactive solutions, one of Voice4Net’s primary aims is to generate new and useful tools that integrate “telephony” and database systems. At its core, the evolving technology addresses an often broken system whose inefficiency can be captured in a simple question millions of people can relate to on a daily basis: “Have you ever called a business and a voice prompt asks you to enter in your account number and password, get verified by the system,” only to have the Customer Service Representative ask you for the same information all over again?” 

            “I use that term ‘pleasant caller experience’ a lot in presentations and speaking engagements, because I believe that the one thing that will always differentiate companies offering similar services or products is their customer service,” says McFarland. “If the caller is not happy, if we can’t create an fast and accurate experience for them on that crucial phone call, then everyone is wasting their time. Interactive voice response (IVR) and self service solutions have a bad name today because of the abuse of the technology that exists. When a call comes in, the rep should be able to immediately see the corresponding information from the database in front of them.

“Too often,” he adds, “the phone system in their contact center is not connected to the database on the back end or the IVR system. There’s no communication between them. Voice4Net offers our distributors our products that they can bundle with the phone systems they install for their customers. Contributing to customer relationship management, we bring the so called ‘middle ware’ between those two, connecting the back end database to their established phone system so the agent can provide the optimal caller experience.”          

In all of the official literature connected to such Voice4Net system solutions -- the Contact Center HD (CCHD), Screen Pop Pro Server (SPPS), Interactive Voice Reponse (IVR) and Event Broadcast System (EBS) – McFarland injects a bit of visual humor amidst the hard facts, screen visuals and data. In a smaller photo, a customer is pictured is pictured with a troubled scowl on his face; the caption says, “From this…” Adjacent to this image is a photo of the same man looking satisfied and serene; the caption says, “…to this.”

Just below those photos is a brief mention of one of the key takeaways for the companies that buy Voice4Net technology with their telecom systems: ROI. Whether they employ a single solution or a custom designed mix of several, the end result for users is a significantly stronger Return on Investment. Some simple math is done to illustrate. For example, a small contact center with only one thousand calls per day can reduce call times by 20 seconds and gain $1,750 per month in savings—based on 5.56 hours saved per day, $15 average cost per agent, five work days per week and 4.2 weeks per month average.    

            The Voice4Net website has a References & Testimonials page listing and showing the logos of some of the company’s most valued new and ongoing relationships with everything from restaurant chains, financial institutions and telecommunications companies to healthcare companies and local municipalities of various sizes. Those who have used these solutions and experienced the ROI factor include GTI Global Telecom, Meridian, ALMAC, Anthony Robbins International, Harris County, Texas (whose IT budget, McFarland says, is larger than that of the state of Rhode Island), Jefferson County, Kentucky, Chuck E. Cheese’s, Gateway EDI, Festiva Resorts, Columbian Financial Group, New Mexico Lottery Commission, Pennsylvania State Police, Stanford University and Sam Ash Music Stores.

            “There are some other companies like ours out there, with software designed to help automated call centers, but we go about our business in unique way,” says McFarland. “Our philosophical approach goes back to the platinum rule. Where most of my competitors make software they think the industry will want and hope their instincts are correct, I go to my distributors directly, find out the specific needs of their customers and build what they want. It’s a very hands-on, custom boutique approach. I ask them what else they would like or how they want the system to ‘behave,’ and how can I best make their unique selling propositions come to life using this technology. The best analogy I can think of is custom home building vs. tract home living. You can live in a generic trailer home because it’s basic shelter, but do you want to? When you’re running your business, like when you are choosing the perfect place to live, it’s best to go custom.”

            Voice4Net’s flagship solution is the Contact Center HD (CCHD), which was created to provide easy to use tools for managing both voice and text communication. It helps manage both voice and text communication. At its heart is the company’s IVR/ACD (Interactive Voice Response & Automatic Call Disribution) solution, used to control customer contacts intelligently and with the using company’s internal resources and expert workers. The system’s intelligent media handling capability controls the routing of multi-media contacts efficiently and quickly.

            The agent’s desktop can fully integrate with voice, email, web, text and CRM solutions, providing call control or pop up screens based on Caller ID or IVR information. IVR apps coupled with ACD configurations leverage the latest voice over IP technology

“SIP.” Traditional voice lines can also be used and both SIP and digital based systems can scale from a few agents to thousands in a customer premise, hosted solution or a blended environment.

Simplifying, McFarland says, “CCHD is multi-media, which means effective communication with customers any way any time. The customer can call into the system, reach it by live web chat, send a text, or email. Everything is consolidated into a single queueing system.

            “It really boils down to how customers want to communicate,” he adds. “The whole fragmentation element of the process is what hinders effective customer service. So integrating them this way helps empower the agent and of course, leads to…making the customer’s life more pleasant!”

            Voice4Net’s Screen Pop Pro Server serves to enhance the interaction between the caller, the agent desktop and corporate data. The primary function of the screen pop is to give the contact center agent more information about the person up front. The SPPS package is a robust software system that integrates that information quickly and from a myriad of sources. The package reduces average call duration by getting information up front and passing it along to the agent for instant feedback.

            The Custom Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is, according to McFarland, the single most powerful database-driven telephony solution in the history of automated communications, turning the process of data delivery and acquisition into a simple, effective stream of exchange. It combines the simplicity of the telephone with the connectivity and integration of the internet.

            Voice4Net developed the Event Broadcasting System (EBS) as a time critical communication predictive dialing solution. It’s a state of the art database driven telephony environment that provides call centers and public agencies the capability to broadcast time critical information to response teams quickly via telephone. Calls are either initiated by the IVR or accepted from the outside and distributed in an intelligent fashion to emergency response teams (pager, cell phone or email). Response team members may be automatically connected to an emergency conference call to allow immediate planning and response strategy discussions. It is managed by a standard web browser and maybe accessed by any secure location on the network.

            “I recommend that prospective clients take a look at our catalog to better understand the scope of all of the things we have created that tie into the systems of vertical markets,” says McFarland. “We have taken vertical markets like healthcare, insurance, retail, financial, real estate and education and created specific products for those markets to make it easier for the dealers to know exactly who to talk to and which customers match those profiles – so they can start selling their products and services right away.”

            A self starter/computer whiz kid who dropped out of college when he realized he was helping the teachers in his computer courses do their jobs, McFarland bypassed his initial goal of being a Hollywood stuntman to work in a data center at a large school supply distribution company as a programmer. After a quirky offer to relocate in Texas (“Here’s $200 and a company van, meet you in Texas”), McFarland began doing mainframe support and software development. Though he was offered a similar position at a large financial institution with a similar mainframe, he stayed with the supply company for over ten years.

When McFarland received offers from other companies to work with their systems, he created his own consulting company, to help run the data centers of various companies at once. In the 90s, he entered the mergers and acquisitions maelstrom several times and realized – despite his ability to develop software solutions for Interactive Voice Response systems – that his deeper talents lay more in being an entrepreneur than developer. He launched Voice4Net as a side consulting company for customer service firms; it later evolved into a software solutions company after he sold his other companies.

“We created a back office automation system from scratch to work with call centers, and it has taken longer than we originally expected to fully get off the ground due to two major economic crashes over the last decade,” says McFarland. “But the growth of the internet has served to increase the call volume at call centers and our goal all along was to develop software to make the customer service process easier and build more distribution channels and secure more customers. The last six to 12 months have seen a real uptick, and we are expecting major growth at Voice4Net in 2013.”