The Amcat skips

Customer care and interaction solutions provider Amcat has announced they’ve been chosen by Birmingham-based Countrywide Skips to provide their customer contact management system. The new system will be used to enable the company to manage inbound advertising response from consumers looking to hire a skip anywhere in the country, says company PR, and will automate its business-to-business telemarketing campaigns.

All right, now, i’m going to slam on the brakes here. Congratulations to Amcat on what is certainly a good deal for their firm; Countrywide Skips skipper (okay, he’s actually the managing director) David Austin says that he expects the Amcat system to “manage over 5,000 calls per month within the next few months and our inbound calls to increase to around 16,000 within 12 months.” Fine, that’s all well and good. But what is a skip, you may ask?

Unfortunately, www.countrywideskips.com is mostly out of commission. It seems someone is “currently doing a bit of building work on our site” and so nothing but the homepage can be accessed, so bang goes assistance from “About Us.” In bulbous and excited red and blue font, Countrywide Skips does provide all skip sizes, including mini, midi, builders, RO/ROs, and grab hire service. (I think that’s a size) and also with Jumbo Bag, you can buy it, fill it and we’ll take it away. This is starting to sound like a Riddle of Sphinx thing…hopefully, Amcat can help them with their site, too.

So over at the really swell Merriam-Webster website, there are no relevant definitions for “skip.” (I can’t imagine a firm with 400 depots in the U.K. would be in the business of stuffing bowls teams captains in Jumbo Bags.) I even checked out other sites reporting this story. Over at always informed and readable TMCNet, good ol’ editor David Sims put out an open appeal for an explanation of the damn word.

According to the 4100-plus page “Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary,” a skip may be defined as “in mining or quarrying, a bucket, box, basket, cage, or wagon, in which materials or men are drawn up or let down.” Could this be the business of Countrywide Skips?

In any event, Austin declared that “The beauty of the Amcat solution is that it is perfect for growing companies such as ourselves. We can add new capacity as we expand and implement new features when we need them. We also have the capability to integrate it with our other business systems such as Sage in the future.”

Hopefully, his firm can now get to work on that website.

Amcat is a leading provider of IP-based contact centre solutions. The Amcat clientele now numbers over 2,000 companies.