A Note From The Quiet Side Of Call Center Software

by Marketing @Connect First
April 27, 2017

No matter how long you’ve been a customer of Connect First, chances are you haven’t interacted with anyone on my surprisingly small team. That’s not to say we aren’t working incredibly hard, or that we’re not constantly handling customer requests, bugs, and new features.

On the contrary, we’re as close to those issues as a team could possibly be. When something on the Connect First platform isn’t working as expected, we spend hours, sometimes days, fighting through that issue until whatever’s broken is completely restored.

Can you guess who we are?

Let me give you a few other hints — there’s a stereotype that we love Mountain Dew and Cheetos,  and that we like to hide in dark basements playing Zelda until our mom tells us it’s time for dinner.

I’m sure that did it, and if it didn’t, I’m not sure there’s much else I could tell you that would. We’re the developers.

We’re not just any developers. We’re a ragtag crew of 11 who work our butts off to write not just call center software that works, but call center software that’s better than anything you could have imagined. Here’s how we’re doing it.

We Rewrote the Backend
About 12 years ago, the co-founder of Connect First, Geoff Mina, wrote the entire platform with the help of a few employees/friends in a house in Atlanta. From what I’ve heard, the only good part about this office was the taco place nearby. Somehow, with minimal funding, and quite honestly not a whole lot of experience, they built an extremely stable, extremely reliable cloud call center software platform using the coding language ColdFusion. That platform lasted for about ten years before Connect First decided it was time for a major upgrade.

Our new platform, ANSEL, took about two years to write in its entirety. It has all the same features as the old platform, but is, simply put, a million times better. We chose to write the backend in Java this time around, a tried and true programming language that’s been around for 20 years but still supports some of the largest companies in the world and is continually being improved and updated.

As a result, the new platform is faster and more scalable than our past platform, and it’s incredibly easy to add completely new features. It can handle uploading half a million leads, and will also make sure that if you want to change the name of your cloud profile from “Hannah’s Clud” to “Hannah’s Cloud,” then that’s taken care of, too.

We Rewrote the Frontend
The great new interface you see on ANSEL is made possible by blood, sweat, tears, and AngularJS.

AngularJS is a framework for Javascript, an extremely popular language used to write all sorts of programs. We used AngularJS to write the front end of our platform — that is, everything you physically see when you use ANSEL.

One of the most amazing aspects of our new platform is that the front end and the back end were written entirely separately from one another — the Angular front end accesses the back end through the Java REST API that we wrote. Essentially, the front end asks for data from the REST API, and the REST API hands it over.

We wrote the front end in such a way that, once it gets the data it needs, it handles that information swiftly and dynamically. That means you get to see those IVRs faster, your Scripting Studio works better, and your dashboard widgets are able to display all the stats you want on how your call center is performing — and you can make it all pop up in your favorite color.

Yeah, that means we rewrote the whole platform from scratch. This software is brand spankin’ new!

Why does this matter? 
ANSEL was a long time coming. We knew our old platform was outdated, but if we were going to build a new version, we were going to build the best version.

If you saw the movie “Hidden Figures”, you might remember a certain scene near the end. In it, the mathematics team at NASA kept turning in new proposals for the space flight. Each time, however, they were told, “You’re too late, the math has changed,” or “We decided in the meeting ten minutes ago that we’re going in a different direction.” That’s kind of how working on ANSEL has felt.

If we were working on a feature but found a better way to do it, we would rewrite it. If we had almost finished something but it didn’t meet our expectations, we scrapped it. In developing this software, we didn’t approve and release anything that we didn’t feel was the absolute best code we could have written.

Yes, this took a little longer. Yes, it took a lot of hard work. Does that mean ANSEL was perfect when we finally released? No, of course not. In a platform this big there will probably always be small bugs, and there will always be something to improve on.

At the end of “Hidden Figures,” because NASA was so meticulous about their calculations, they sent the first American to space. About a month ago, because ANSEL was written and rewritten to create the best call center software we could, 11 hardworking developers sent the platform out into the world. It might have been a long road, but it was a journey worth taking, and a journey that we’re proud of. We hope you’re proud to use our software, too.

And for the record, only one of us loves Cheetos. I can’t say the same about Zelda.

Want to learn more about what our newly rewritten platform can do for you? Check out our website, or schedule a call today. Our team of seasoned platform experts is ready to help you find the right solutions for your business.

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