Finding the American Dream: Jim Taphorn
Hard Work and Superior Services Rock Call-Center Industry
Joe Schroeder
Issue date: 1/20/10 Section: Opinion
Jim Taphorn and two other men founded Tantacomm Systems in 1994 with the goal of correcting severe inefficiencies in the call-center industry. By 2008, when the three sold the business to a group of investors, Tantacomm had revolutionized the way dozens of companies performed their operations, employed 12 people, and performed services for corporations as large as TD Ameritrade. The business was run on the principles of good products, good services, and hard, hard work.
Prior to Tantacomm's inception, businesses that allowed costumers to make purchases over the telephone recorded the "confirmation" of each call (in which costumers were asked to confirm the type and quantity of products that they were ordering) on cassette tapes. These tapes acted as references in case customers were to later dispute the terms of their order. Dozens of people were employed in manually filing the tapes with the order to which they belonged.
Mr. Taphorn, along with friends Leo Boston and Mike VanderVoort, were told of this state of affairs by a software programmer, and they conceived the idea of using computers to store data and automate the entire process. Mr. Taphorn says he recalls visiting a call center company and watching ten employees sit in a room and do nothing but sort tapes! He knew then that he could save the company "a lot, a lot of money."
The three set to work, but they ran into difficulties-it took two years to get the necessary software working. The most widely used computer operating system at the time, MS DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) proved to be an extremely difficult system in which to write the needed coding. Mr. Taphorn is not a programmer (he handled the company's accounting and administration), but he remembers writing a $70,000 check to pay for programming lessons for his partner Leo Boston-in Linux, a new, free, and supposedly more stable computer operating system.
Linux worked like a charm, and it gave the little company a huge competitive advantage over other computerized recording start-ups. Not only did it prove easier for them to write code, but the operating system avoided a problem that Mr. Taphorn terms, "memory leakage." MS DOS, and even contemporary Microsoft operating systems, he says, gradually lose access to memory the longer they run. Tantacomm's competitors, running in MS DOS, would have to shut down and reboot their computers multiple times per day. When making sales to potential customers, Tantacomm would mention Linux and the customers would be sold. "They knew it worked," Mr. Taphorn explains.
Prior to Tantacomm's inception, businesses that allowed costumers to make purchases over the telephone recorded the "confirmation" of each call (in which costumers were asked to confirm the type and quantity of products that they were ordering) on cassette tapes. These tapes acted as references in case customers were to later dispute the terms of their order. Dozens of people were employed in manually filing the tapes with the order to which they belonged.
Mr. Taphorn, along with friends Leo Boston and Mike VanderVoort, were told of this state of affairs by a software programmer, and they conceived the idea of using computers to store data and automate the entire process. Mr. Taphorn says he recalls visiting a call center company and watching ten employees sit in a room and do nothing but sort tapes! He knew then that he could save the company "a lot, a lot of money."
The three set to work, but they ran into difficulties-it took two years to get the necessary software working. The most widely used computer operating system at the time, MS DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) proved to be an extremely difficult system in which to write the needed coding. Mr. Taphorn is not a programmer (he handled the company's accounting and administration), but he remembers writing a $70,000 check to pay for programming lessons for his partner Leo Boston-in Linux, a new, free, and supposedly more stable computer operating system.
Linux worked like a charm, and it gave the little company a huge competitive advantage over other computerized recording start-ups. Not only did it prove easier for them to write code, but the operating system avoided a problem that Mr. Taphorn terms, "memory leakage." MS DOS, and even contemporary Microsoft operating systems, he says, gradually lose access to memory the longer they run. Tantacomm's competitors, running in MS DOS, would have to shut down and reboot their computers multiple times per day. When making sales to potential customers, Tantacomm would mention Linux and the customers would be sold. "They knew it worked," Mr. Taphorn explains.
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