How A/V Switching, Automation Help Comcast Call Center

Here’s a twist on the often repeated tale of the professional integrator cleaning up a project after the cable guys: the professional integrator doing a project for the cable guys.

It’s a good thing for Comcast that Centennial, Colo.-based Logic Integration put in, and eventually won, the bid to outfit the provider’s Denver call/command center, too. Had the corporate cable guys stuck with their original plan, the call center workers might have quit already.

According to Logic Integration CEO Shawn Hansson, Comcast was planning on purchasing four TVs from Best Buy to be plugged directly into computers for all of their monitoring and service needs. We’re pretty sure the Geek Squadders have never heard of key brands such as Crestron or Stewart Filmscreen, and that’s part of what it took to make this installation sing.

“We did see some photos, so we knew the scale of what they were really wanting to do,” says Hansson. “They were going to use a vacant room, because at the time they had people spread out in offices. So they were going to set up cubes in the back of the room for people who work in the call center, while the front half would be a command center where they could see weather information, system outages, call volume. A couple of their other facilities have Crestron, full A/V switching, etc., so we recommended that and gave them a bid.”

The idea was that instead of employees sitting in cubes to instant message or shout over cubicle walls at each other about data on their PC screens, they would be at open desks and work with and communicate about what they could collectively view on big screens.

Photos: How A/V Switching, Automation Help Comcast Call Center

From design to execution, it took the Logic Integration team, headed by Hansson, Isaac Moyle and Bill Craig, about two months to finish the slick system that includes:

• 10 Sony flat-panel LED TVs and short-throw projector
• 110-inch Stewart StarGlas screen
• 12 Dell PCs each with dual monitors
• SpeakerCraft in-ceiling speakers
• Crestron Digital Quad control processor

Logic Integration also put in a furniture bid in using Middle Atlantic’s new ViewPoint Technical Furniture series whose turnkey offerings saved the company “about 30 to 40 percent” on that cost, Hansson says. The end-user submits a layout design, Hansson says, and Middle Atlantic generates an equipment list - in this case featuring all the desks, seating, monitor holders and LCD brackets for the desks, equipment racks and video wall racks.