My client has recently hired a call center to manage phone orders that will coincide with a national print ad that will come out next month. I have been tasked with coordinating with the call center reps and providing them with a way for their sales agents to record the sales. They have provided me with 3 options:

  1. Create an online form that would not require their agents to login or create a password for each transaction
  2. Let them create their own database with our products and send an encrypted batch file with all the transactions at the end of each day
  3. Let them create their own database with our products and send individual encrypted emails of each transaction


Each of these methods has benefits and drawbacks. The main factor is cost of each solution. The first is the least expensive and uses the existing site. The second and third cost a great deal more since the call center has to program their own tool to manage sales.

My client would prefer that the call center agents use the existing site so he does not have to re-input information that has been collected, regardless if it's in a batch file or individual email. We would like to keep all the transactions recorded into our database to manage post-sales issues in the ZC admin and use ZC features in the event that a call-in customer has an email address.

The call center reps are not that rigid with the login aspect of the site and state that agents shop the site same way a user would shop when inputting a customer's products but do not want them to have to create a password/login for customers.

My problem is that many customers who may call on our advertisement may not have an email address but I do want to collect the email addresses from customers who have them. The call center rep would prefer that we have some sort of auto-populate feature for passwords when they are using the site to prevent them from having to create a login. ZC requires an email address as the username and I do not want to compromise security for generating passwords so what I am faced with is either:

  1. Create a method for a username and password to be created that is not email dependent (I could have agents use a custom password for their entries maybe a modified master password contribution or a server side password generator when the password field is empty)
  2. provide them with a unique account creation page that only allows access via their IP address and auto-populates the username and password somehow


Does anyone have any suggestions and/or experience with dealing with a call center or phone orders in general? How did you deal with taking orders by phone from customers who don't have an email address? Are there other possibilities that I may not have considered that would solve this?

Thanks,

cpk