A weekly compendium of call centers that are opening, closing, and making the news around the world.

Every so often it's good to 'take the pulse' of the call center industry by looking at the blogs. From my unscientific random sampling, I'd say there's a mild disturbance in the force. People are restless. Agents are getting world-weary.

A weekly compendium of call centers that are opening, closing, and making the news around the world.

Speech recognition technology seems to be about one of two things these days: replacing the human agent and connecting us to other technology when we can't (or don't want to) press buttons.

During IBM's press event for their "Future of Speech Day," I learned about talking cars, call routing systems that would allow me to yell and swear and still route my call correctly, Wake Forest University's experiments giving students pocket PCs, and the science of engineering a "pleasant transaction" through speech rec.

A week or so ago, we reported that Lloyds TSB, a UK bank, will stop using scripts in their call centers. Apparently callers don't like that "polished" tone in their agents.

We found a script of a different kind on a Dutch website recently: the EGBG anti-telemarketing Counterscript. As far as I can tell it was created by a guy named Martijn Engelbregt.

That's the underlying message of some of the latest research on selecting sites for call centers – onshore or offshore.

In any given region, you'll find people who work for more or less money than people in another place. But site selection isn't simply about comparing hourly wages.

Wages represent tradeoffs. In a wealthy country that offers, say, consistently top-notch public education and universal health care, you may pay more up front in hourly wages. Yet as a percentage of these wages, you might pay less for some types of benefits, like health care, if they're already available to residents in or citizens of that country.

Here's something else to keep in mind. If you're in an area where the labor market is saturated, you increase your risk of turnover among agents. A call center that retains more than half its workforce throughout the course of a year is more productive than one that doesn't.

Other factors in site selection that have become painfully apparent during the last 13 months include the vulnerability of a region to natural disasters, as well as a region's political stability.

The upshot: As you think about prospective locations for your call center, don't limit your consideration only to agents' wages; find out about the environment in which agents work and live.

Stay tuned – and join us – for further discussions about how to evaluate agents not in terms of what they earn, but rather what they do.

I've been reading a blog by the guys who run VocaLabs, a Minnesota company that does testing on customer service and IVR systems. They describe what they do as "collecting caller-focused data on companies' customer service operations."

Business X Uses, Likes Business Y's Product / X Acquires Y

Here at the Call Center Magazine news desk, we get a lot of news items reporting on a company -- usually some vertical, say a bank -- using a telecom product/service company's products, usually some call center software. This isn't exactly hard news -- there's no new product, no dramatic shift in the market -- it's just a vendor announcing a successful deal with a client. Other times, we get news of small or foreign market acquisitions. Sometimes these are good opportunities to mention great products or services, but other times they're just not newsworthy. Now, there is finally a place for that lost deal news: The Call Center Deal Report.

A weekly compendium of call centers that are opening, closing, and making the news around the world.

In my conversation with two of Symon Communication's experts, Bob Brittan and VP of development Keith Roller, we talked about the Symon Enterprise Server for our February analytics article. I asked them to talk a little more about Symon's approach to metrics and KPIs; here's what they said:

I interviewed a couple of AIM Technology's experts for our February Analytics article. AIM's VP of marketing Carl Tsukahara and CTO David Middleton had some good insights on call center metrics and how the things we measure are changing. We also talked about key performance indicators (KPIs) and AIM's brand of multi-dimensional analysis.

I'd like to pose a couple questions to call center managers and anyone who has used speech analytics: What do you think? Are these tools worth it? I couldn't help thinking that software that listened for things that any decent team of agents could tell you (like a flurry of calls complaining about the better rates your competitor offers) was redundant. Has anyone out there had really good or really bad experiences with speech analytics? Let me know.

While I was researching analytics for the February issue, I got some urgent messages from vendors of speech analytics products, eager to be included in the article, which was about a different kind of analytics.

A weekly compendium of call centers that are opening, closing, and making the news around the world.

In May 2004, the BBC aired a program called Brassed Off Britain, which talked about "the UK's top ten consumer gripes." I happened upon the website for this program while looking for an article on a UK bank that decided to stop using scripts for its agents. Agents who stick to scripts, of course, are one of the things that "brass off" Brits about call centres. I mean centers.

A weekly compendium of call centers that are opening, closing, and making the news around the world.