Some callers see automatic call routing systems as tools that save the call center hassle at the expense of the caller's sanity. That's what best-selling British grammar writer Lynne Truss thinks anyway. Her new book, Talk to the Hand is all about rudeness, and she's got a whole chapter that deals with computers and call centers. Truss is well known for her "zero tolerance approach to punctuation," a book called Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which sold well in America, but was criticized for being too tolerant and too British (they use commas a bit differently than we do).

Her new book is a 206-page rant on rudeness and "a rallying cry for civility." Chapter two, "Why Am I Doing This?" laments customer service automation. "These systems force us to navigate ourselves into channels that are clearly designed for someone else's convenience, not ours," Truss writes. "But such is modern life. Armies of underpaid call center workers have now been recruited and trained, not to help us, but to assure us, ever so politely, that the system simply does not allow us to have what we want, and no, you cannot speak to a supervisor because the system isn't organized that way."

The crux of her argument is that automated systems and scripted calls take the choice out of these customer service interactions. She's looking for that elusive "press zero to speak with an operator" option. So what does Ms. Truss propose as a remedy? Well, she doesn't have an answer -- at least not in this chapter. It's a rant, and the idea is to vent; presumably the reader enjoys hearing that someone in England is suffering too.

It's not just callers who suffer from rudeness though -- any agent will tell you that. And the Philadelphia Enquirer reported this week that call center agents suffer quite a bit. According to a study done by the University of Pennsylvania, agents get burned out if they have to pretend to be polite too often.

"Call-center employees were more likely to feel 'emotionally exhausted' -- a major component of burnout -- if their supervisors stressed strict rules of telephone behavior, such as expecting workers to be nice no matter how rude the caller," writes staff reporter Stacey Burling.

Researchers Steffanie Wilk and Lisa Moynihan conducted the study at "an undisclosed, large telecommunications company." The two talked to nearly 1000 supervisors and more than 1,200 agents at different call centers, all within the company.

The agents that were happiest tended to be the ones that had bosses who were less "by the book," bosses who didn't demand agents keep a smile while being shouted at by irate callers.

On both sides of the rudeness issue -- the caller and the agent -- the problem is anonymity. When a caller talks to a machine, even if it's very sophisticated speech recognition software, he or she may feel unimportant. Likewise if the caller speaks to an agent who has no provision to handle his or her problem. If the call center doesn't recognize the callers individuality, the fact that the caller is a person whose problem, purchase, or query is the most important thing to them, the caller gets mad. On the agent side, how often do angry callers treat them as embodiments of nothing but a customer service failure? The lack of recognition of an agent's humanity can be devastating when repeated many times daily.

I've got a couple crazy ideas. What if agents worked in small groups, so they had a sense of community, however minor, in the call center? And what about calling customers back instead of putting them on hold? If all operators are busy, why not let the customer enter his or her phone number -- twice to ensure accuracy -- and the agents can ring them up as they become free?

I'm sure some centers already do these things. What does your center do to keep callers and agents happy? Let me know.

--Harry Sheff