Way down South, down Florida way, the land is fecund, the air is ripe with growth. But there is more growing in South Florida than citrus and mouse ears; indeed, in this lush land one of the flowering fruits is the call center industry. In July 1999, Deloitte & Touche Fantus Consulting released a report stating that for the second year in a row, Florida led the nation in the creation of new call center jobs, with more than 14,000 potential call center positions in 1998. In addition, Florida is also becoming rich in the call center technology area. South Florida has become a crucible for new and better technologies and services for the call center market. It was with this in mind that I accompanied a couple of my colleagues down South for a closer look.

SunDial Technologies

The first stop on our tour was SunDial Technologies in Fort Lauderdale. There we met with SunDial's President and CEO Scott Snyder. Mr. Snyder explained that SunDial began selling its SunDial Windows Predictive Dialer in 1993 and has enhanced the product since that time to keep with up with current technology. Aimed at small to mediumsized businesses that want the productivity increases brought by a dialer, the SunDial Windows Predictive Dialer is designed to run from four to unlimited agent stations, but Mr. Snyder said the SunDial installations average from 16 to 32 stations.