The first sign of this came from VocaLabs' quarterly reports on the mobile phone and financial call center sectors. Check out their newsletter. Washington Mutual has walloped the other banks in customer satisfaction lately. What's been going wrong the other banks? And why are Sprint's customers so unsatisfied? And 41% of PayPal customers said it was hard to get an agent. Is the dissatisfaction institutional?

I cheered up a little when I read Wall Street Journal tech writer Jeremy Wagstaff's blog. His latest entry, Verifying the Verifiers tells the surreal story of his bank calling to verify his account information, and Wagstaff asking for verification that the agent calling to verify is actually with the bank. The bank calls him Wagstaff Jeremy, adding to the absurdity. Here's a sample:

--How do I know you’re the Verification Division? How can I verify that?
--You can’t. Not until we verify that you’re Wagstaff Jeremy.
--I’m not going to tell you something like that!
--Oh. A moment’s silence.
--Are you the people I called to verify that it was the Verification Division?
--You mean the Verification of Verications Division?
--That’s what you call it?
--Yes.
--Geez. Yes, I guess so.
--We can’t verify that until we verify you.
--Ah. Long silence ensues.

Wagstaff's advice:

Banks: don’t encourage customers to be cavalier with their own personal information. Never call them up without giving them an easy way, via a switchboard and code, to confirm it’s an employee and not a scumbag they’re talking to.

This reminds me of the nasty story I read yesterday. I was doing some background research for my weekly call center openings blog. A report that Allied Interstate collections agency was opening up a big call center in New York state prompted me to Google that company. One of the first things that came up was the Minnesota attorney general's office: they filed a complaint against Allied. It seems call center agents from Allied were systematically calling the wrong people, over and over again, to try to collect on debts. They were rude, they accused consumers of lying, and refused to stop calling, even when it should have been obvious that the agents were calling the wrong person.

The zeal with which Allied pursued the wrong people was frightening. Ms. Mary Kitzmann of Alexandria, Minnesota received harassing calls even after telling Allied agents that the middle initial and social security number was different from the person they claimed she was.

Allied left Sandra Mack of Minneapolis some automated messages, telling her to call a toll free number. She ignored them at first. She called after the messages wouldn't stop, and figured out that the debt Allied was trying to collect was for a woman with the same last name who lived down the street. But the calls didn't stop.

Lisa Burk of Minneapolis got threatening calls from Allied agents who refused to believe that her last name was not actually Stearns. In one call, an Allied agent identified himself as Marcus Welby, the name of a fictional television doctor from an ABC series in the 1970s.

The full complaint is on the Minnesota attorney general's website.

Reading that made me indignant. Next, I checked one of my favorite blogs, the vitriolic Call Center Steel Cage Death Match. This call center manager's latest entry was a rant on the terrible design of call center cubicles. I scrolled down to "Retention Detention," an entry about retention agents:

Our job was to taking the calls from people who wanted to cancel the added-on service and try to convince them to keep it. That's called "retention". I can think of a couple of other words to describe it, but they're not polite. But basically, "retention" is when someone says "I don't want this service anymore, please cancel it now," and the call center rep is supposed to offer a "rebuttal" - that is, they cheefully inform the customer that they certainly can cancel that service but "Do you mind if I ask why you want to cancel today?" Then begins the parry and thrust of trying to get the customer to see the error of their cancelling ways and to keep the service.

Sounds like a miserable job: "Most of the reps hated this project - basically because it felt antithetical to the idea of customer service to them - i.e. the customer calls up with a request and it's your job to try to thwart that request."

The usually cheerful Call Center Purgatory had an entry (scroll down) called "But You've Got to Help Me! I'm Pathetic, Don't You See?" in which this call center worker fields a call from a woman who locked her keys in her car in a bad neighborhood. She's called the wrong agent -- our hero is an investment counselor.

In the Sunday, January 15 entry, this blogger sympathizes with abused Indian agents.

Working in any call center has days where it really sucks, but to know that you are calling people that are going to call you racist names, make fun of the way you speak, and degrade your culture, well, that's just beyond call center purgatory, that my friends, would be call center hell.

On to the next blog. Call Centre Confidential was out of commission for about half a year, but it's up again. As far as I can tell it's done by a woman in the UK. Here's what she wrote when she came back:

In the month that the Dutch have finally admitted that working in a call centre is not the fulfilling job that we were promised, by opening one in a prison, it is fitting that I come back.

I left seeking fame and fortune. I discovered that the streets maybe lined with gold, but they are also dotted with dog muck in neat piles. Some people have a calling for greatness; I’m clearly destined to work in call centres.

A little gloomy. But this brightened my day: an entry in The Consumerist blog, a new one from the Gawker media machine, included a photo of what they think is a T-Mobile call center. Just look for the guy with the gold metallic tie and the blue/black/green/purple hair. Remember that T-Mobile performed quite well in VocaLabs' latest survey. And compare this photo of a cubicle to the ones Steel Cage Death Match posts. Is that T-Mobile's secret?

Know of a good call center blog? Do you write one? You should. Tell us about your work.