After reading the New York Times' August 16th article titled "At Netflix, Victory for Voices Over Keystrokes," I have to express my appreciation to Netflix for its sensible approach to service.

Too often, those of us who work in call centers, and those of us who observe them, hear predictions that on-line communication will replace conversations between customers and the companies they do business with.

A far more nuanced analysis, which you can hear during our August 16th Webcast, reveals that it's much more helpful to think of on-line communication as an option in addition to, rather than as a substitute for, conversations.

Sometimes, as appears to be the case with customers of Netflix, consumers prefer live conversations to e-mail correspondence to such an extent that companies – like Netflix – make the decision to assist customers entirely by phone.

What combination of phone and on-line communication works best in your call center? I invite you to drop me a line to offer your thoughts and observations.

I know it's early, but in the spirit of preparing for the fall, I'd like to share my perspective about what I will focus on in an upcoming piece about call center offshoring; the piece will appear in the October issue of Customer Management Insight.

Here are some of the questions to which I will seek answers that reflect various points of view:

1. How accurate are wages as indicators of labor costs for prospective offshore call center locations? To phrase this question in another way, what other factors, in addition to wages, should companies consider as they evaluate potential costs and benefits of offshoring?

2. What factors are most likely to influence the quality of customer service that is typically available from leading offshore call center locations? To what extent, if any, could the quality of service that is typically available from a given region justify labor costs associated with that region?

3. What role do attrition and labor scalability in a given region play in encouraging businesses to look into locations they might have otherwise not thought to consider? What are recent examples of lesser-known offshore call enter locations that are benefiting from labor saturation in better-known regions?

4. Given that an increasing percentage of American consumers speak Spanish, to what extent do you expect call center operations that are based offshore will tap Spanish-speaking labor forces to serve American customers who speak Spanish?

5. What other trends in call center offshoring should companies be aware of?

Stay tuned for further thoughts about call center offshoring.

Just as I'm working on distilling information from an Accenture report on government call centers and how they've still got a bit of room to improve, I run across this angry letter in the Washington Post from a woman trying to get a passport renewed:

I was so incensed by the July 9 letter from Maura Harty, assistant U.S. secretary of state for consular affairs, that I can hardly believe I haven't spontaneously combusted.

My son applied for a passport on May 31 for a July 8 departure, paying the expediting fee. When I went to the Web site that Ms. Harty directed readers to in her letter, I was told "the passport is in process" and nothing else. Calling the passport call center was equally unsatisfying. The agents at the center can do two things: (1) tell you they don't know anything and can't help you because they aren't allowed to talk with passport issuers; and (2) put up to two whole notes in your file asking the squirreled-away processors to expedite the process (which we had already paid for).

What happens next? If someone in the issuance section actually reads the notes, this person may or may not respond and let the call center people know what is going on. For this reason I was asked to call the call center back two days later. When I did, I waited 35 minutes for someone to tell me that they didn't know anything.

To add insult to injury, if you are able to wait the 40-plus minutes it takes to access the call center's "automated" appointment maker, you then get the pleasure of standing outside in the blazing sun for hours between the time of your appointment and the time someone actually can see you. You are not told that you are to be outside, in the blazing sun, with no shade, and thus none of the more than 50 people in line had hats, water or sunscreen. Did they have someone outside providing information to the people waiting? Absolutely not.

If you need a passport, don't call the State Department's ridiculous number or visit its inane Web site. Call your senator or your representative.

One of the key findings in the Accenture report is that merely having the technology to do things (like IVRs, web sites, call routing) doesn't mean that the cultural change has been made in the call center to really give citizens access to their government and the services it provides.

For examples of how a government call can go right, look to New York's 311 line, or the new 311 service for the City of Minneapolis, which we profiled here.

Do you speak Business? We've all had to learn to understand the jargon and cliche-filled jibber-jabber common in most industries today, but do you speak it yourself?

I interviewed an otherwise intelligent and articulate software vendor representative last year who punctuated every other statement with the phrase "At the end of the day ..." He may have even said "At the end of the day, it is what it is." That statement says absolutely nothing.

As a part of our upcoming article on Electronic Displays in the call center, we spoke with NEC Display Solutions' senior product manager, Hans Baumann. We wanted to get the technical dope on displays, particularly the high resolution plasma and LCD displays that are appearing in so many call centers, large and small.

Baumann explained to us some of the mysteries of displays, like burn-in, viewing angle, and glowing phosphors.

What is the life-span of a display monitor?

Hans Baumann, NEC: This is a good question, and it's something that's really not addressed well in our industry because typically the specification is number of hours to half-brightness, and that means typically that's 50,000-60,000 hours a display can be run. The backlight, the fluorescent tubes in the back will only be putting out half as much light as they did when it was new.

That tells you part of the story, but the bigger part of the story [is]: are the other components in the display also designed to last that long? Typically they're not, typically, many display manufacturers spec out 20,000-30,000 hours for the other components.