Real Soft and the work behind the call

A telephone call is a small act of faith. Somewhere, a system must recognize the request, find the right information, and reach somebody who can help. Real Soft, Inc. works on both sides of that arrangement: the people who answer and the technology that gets a caller to them. It is an unusual combination only until you consider how often one depends on the other.

First, find the people

Rajan Desai founded Real Soft in 1991 after working at companies including AT&T, Lehman Brothers, and Paine Webber. His explanation was refreshingly practical: “I saw the need that there were major corporations that wanted contract workers.” There was a buyer, a shortage, and work to be done.

By September 2001, local newspaper U.S. 1 was describing a company expanding during a telecom downturn. It reported 450 employees in the United States and 70 in Bangalore, with roughly 24 people at the new headquarters. Those figures belong to 2001. Their interest lies in the shape of the operation: a relatively small central office coordinating work elsewhere.

The same report described a careful rehearsal before deployment. Real Soft would check a proposed system’s requirements and compatibility, build a miniature version, and test it. The principle travels well: find the awkward dependencies while the experiment is still small enough to change.

“I saw the need that there were major corporations that wanted contract workers.”Rajan Desai · Founder · 2001

The queue has two ends

Real Soft’s call-center staffing page says it places hundreds of workers annually across the US and India. It describes multilingual professionals handling assignments such as credit-card processing, anti-money-laundering work, IT help desks, sales support, and benefits enrollment. The range matters. A conversation about a frozen account requires different knowledge from a conversation about an employee’s health plan.

The company also lists call-center managers and inbound and outbound associates. That puts it in the daily business of matching skills to a specific operation. An employer can use that service to add capacity without building the entire recruiting process around every temporary requirement.

Meanwhile, the published SmartCallback product offers callers a callback during busy periods or outside working hours. FirstContact describes proactive communication and campaign management for Avaya Voice Portal. These are concrete operational problems: somebody abandons a queue; somebody needs to be contacted. Software supplies another way to organize the work.

Somebody has to watch the machinery

Consider the less visible part of a contact center. Its voice application needs monitoring. Its administrators need alerts. Its managers need to understand service volumes and performance. Real Soft’s published AdminCentral description addresses centralized administration and fault monitoring; ReportCentral describes collecting system and application metrics, moving data into a warehouse, and producing reports.

The company’s partners page describes integration relationships involving Avaya, Cisco, Genesys, and IBM. Much of the terminology belongs to earlier generations of enterprise communications. Read it as evidence of the company’s technical lineage: building around platforms that customers already use, with tools and services that make the surrounding operation manageable.

Its speech practice extends to voice-interface design, application migration, integration, testing, and tuning. This helps explain the company’s place in the market. A customer with an established phone environment needs someone who understands how the pieces connect, including the applications behind the voice interface.

The unglamorous work is the business

Outside the call center, Real Soft advertises application development, database migration, software testing, content management, and ongoing support. A business can commission a new application, move an existing database, or supplement a testing team. These assignments have different boundaries, but each involves fitting technology into a working organization.

Its named customer roster includes AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Liberty Mutual, LexisNexis, and Daiichi Sankyo. The company describes development operations in New Jersey and Bangalore. Its model belongs to the enterprise services market, where staffing firms, systems integrators, and managed-service providers overlap. The relevant comparison depends on whether the buyer needs an individual specialist, a project team, or continuing responsibility for an application.

There is a useful distinction for buyers here. Staff augmentation leaves day-to-day direction with the customer; a project engagement needs an agreed deliverable and acceptance criteria. Treating those purchases as interchangeable makes comparison difficult. A sensible shortlist begins with the responsibility being bought, then asks which supplier can demonstrate the relevant experience.

Who holds the controls?

Real Soft offers two revealing answers to that question. SmartSourcing combines onsite, offsite, and offshore resources according to the assignment. Its published process starts with assessment, analysis, alternatives, and a projected return on investment. The point is to decide how work should be delivered before committing to the arrangement.

Then there is dotECO: dedicated offshore team, “EXTEND, CONTROL and OWN.” The client manages projects and processes in a dedicated offshore setup. After a pre-agreed period, the offering includes an option to transfer assets if the client wants its own facility or subsidiary. Ownership becomes part of the initial conversation.

For a buyer, the useful lesson is to price the whole arrangement: coordination, knowledge transfer, support coverage, and eventual transition. A lower development rate cannot answer those questions. The model also requires a client able to direct the work and an organization permitted to share the necessary systems and information.

That is the thread connecting Real Soft’s offerings. Hiring, development, testing, and maintenance are parts of the same operating problem. The practical starting point is a particular bottleneck: a queue, a skills gap, a migration. Define it, decide who owns it, and test the proposed fix before making it everyone’s problem.