A heaping helping of our weekly compendium of call centers that are opening, closing, and making the news around the world. See our new Weekly News Briefs in the news well on the front page for summaries of the week's sometimes sordid, sometimes tragic worldwide call center news.

If you read the Q&A on our front page, you know that EIG's Rex Stringham is. And believe it or not, so are we. Sensational call center stories are hard to come by though, so when I saw the New York Times on Sunday, I was excited. William C. Taylor, founding editor of the hip business magazine Fast Company wrote a nice piece on English and the Great IVR Debate, but if you've been following Mr. English's media arc, you won't find any new ideas, just new commentators.

The most interesting parts of Taylor's article aren't about Paul English. The reason we're getting tired of Paul English is because he's a one-trick pony: he's got a complaint, and his function isn't to change anything -- only the call centers can do that. But the rest of Taylor's article is worth talking about because much of it echoes what we've been saying for a while.

We're starting our research and information gathering for our May Workforce Management article, and we thought we'd post some questions and past articles for our readers to ponder. We encourage all of our readers -- call center agents and managers, vendors, and anyone else with an opinion or a question -- to e-mail us.

Here are a few of our preliminary questions:

1. What is WFM? Is WFM software more than just fancy scheduling software?
   
2. Who needs it?
   
3. What's new in WFM? Any trends? What are clients/users/managers asking for?
   
4. Can WFM systems work with remote agents and virtual call centers?
   
5. How different are small-center entry level workforce management tools from those at the high end?
   
6. How well integrated are workforce management tools with other agent-based applications, like training delivery and quality assurance systems? Should they be integrated?
   
7. How does WFM software address turnover and agent morale?

A documentary from last year called John and Jane is making film festival news again, this time at the Berlin Film Festival. The movie follows six Indian call center workers over three years. The title refers to the Anglo-American names agents gave themselves.

The Bombay-based director Ashim Ahluwalia told an Australian news service that the movie wasn't really about business process outsourcing, saying, "John and Jane is more about the need for everyone to become a hybrid American. It's like that in India and I think the whole world is becoming like that."

Mr. Ahluwalia continued, "The film is about what it means to be Indian in the 21st century. I didn't mean to make a portrait of the middle class. But they represent the direction India is going in." He went on, "They shape our taste and our aesthetics and in some ways, without meaning to they end up shaping our identities. John and Jane is that fantasy of where we want to be as a country. We don't want to see cows on the street any more."

Writing for new age doctor Deepak Chopra's blog collective IntentBlog, Toronto-based filmmaker Mohit Rajhans called the movie one of the best documentaries he's seen in a while. He quoted the Toronto Film Festival's write up from last September:

"As part of their training, they learn the meanings that work, money and God hold for Americans. In classes that could be read as satire or tragedy, they study shopping flyers as though they were textbooks. Some begin to adopt American values as their own. One dreams of buying his own Spanish-style villa. Another notes, "Everyone who's ever gone to America gets rich." When their shifts end, Glen and Sydney go back to traditional Indian homes, with simple amenities and mothers who urge them to eat."

A review from Variety praised the movie's use of 35mm film (instead of video) and its high, security camera-like angles. Reviewer Robert Koehler notes, "Snippets of pronunciation classes are ironic, given the pic's use of English subtitling for the heavily accented English dialogue." Koehler laments the film's lack of ideology, saying "it fails to provide a greater understanding of the hot-button issue of outsourcing."

The online world is full of people who are getting wise to the ways of the call center industry. Irritated consumers are learning how to game everything from IVR systems to whole customer service workflows.

Here's one: on a blog called I Will Teach You To Be Rich (give yourself airs, why don't you) a guy has posted a sample excel spreadsheet that callers should use to keep track of the "lies and promises" call centers make to customers.

So, what do you learn from this? Don't tell the customer something if you can't follow through on it. Stuff we learned in kindergarten still applies: don't lie when you say you're gonna do something. Tell the truth to the caller.

No fewer than 15 people left comments on that blog adding more ideas and suggestions for keeping YOU honest.

And it all stemmed from a single horrific experience that the writer had with a call center at Sprint. Way to go, telco.

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

There are three basic ways that hosted speech service providers price their services: per-minute, per-port, and per completed call. All three are measures of volume, but the last one takes the success of the call into account.

We asked Datamonitor's senior voice business analyst Daniel Hong a few questions about speech IVRs for our upcoming speech recognition service providers article.

Datamonitor came out with a report last July that a lot of speech applications vendors have been quoting. It says that hosted speech is growing, and growing fast. Will this be the end of premise-based speech apps? Not so fast, says Hong. Speech is growing in general, both on premise and hosting.

One of the best experiences of going to a conference is meeting people. At Call Center Demo and Conference in Austin, I was fortunate to chat with a number of call center managers. One chat with a call center manager from Las Vegas was particularly memorable.

The manager shared observations about the effects of the June 2005 merger of two casino companies, Harrah's and Caesars, on their respective call centers. She pointed out that agents who used to answer calls for individual hotels now assist callers on behalf of multiple hotels that are part of the combined company, now known as Harrah's.

The ongoing consolidation of operations within the Harrah's franchise is well-documented in the business press. What intrigues me most about this kind of consolidation, whether it results from a merger or from a company's decision to centralize its call centers, is that agents' job responsibilities undergo significant expansions in scope.

I had one of the most interesting trade show experiences of my career last week. At the Austin Call Center Demo show, I led a tour group of attendees from booth to booth to try to help them organize their experience. Show floors are designed to be chaotic – and haphazard. Companies are sited across the floor based on factors that are irrelevant to the attendees. You buy a booth early, you get a good spot. But from the attendee point of view, that means that when you walk the aisles, you come across a pretty random collection of vendors from different sectors and it can be hard to figure out where to start, how to approach the variety.

So we came up with this idea that we – Call Center's editors – would lead these "tours" of the floor. We'd gather attendees outside the hall, give them a little talk about what they were about to experience, and then take them on a themed walkabout. In my case, I was taking them around to visit about half a dozen vendors that focused on "people and process" stuff.

In a new book, The Pro-Growth Progressive, Gene Sperling, a former economic advisor to President Bill Clinton, recalls what students at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore initially understood when he met with them in 2003. Sperling writes that the students thought he was referring to outsourcing jobs to Africa and to poorer regions of India.

He then points out another development that might seem counterintuitive to many Americans, which is that an Indian company, namely the business process outsourcing arm of the IT services firm MphasiS, opened a call center in Mexico to serve Spanish-speaking customers in the U.S.

The two examples from Sperling’s book challenge several assumptions that a lot of Americans have about outsourcing. One is that America is the only place from which call center jobs could conceivably migrate; another assumption is that call center jobs move to and not from (or within) India.

But globalization isn’t a simple matter of one region gaining jobs at the expense of another. Its effects are both positive and negative for consumers and workers worldwide. The good news about globalization is that there are more consumers than ever to compete for; the bad news is that there are more workers than ever to compete with.

When a whirlwind of responsibilities and questions ambush a call center manager's schedule, it's nice to know that there agencies out there who can give assistance, advice and a template for organizing hiring options for call centers. One option that is more enabling to a call center is working with an advising agency, such as Banks and Dean.

Berta Banks, Vice President of Banks and Dean, focuses on the idea of offering better hiring, training and retaining solutions that call centers can execute on their own.

Enterprise Integration Group, Inc. (EIG) is a consulting firm that helps companies build better IVRs. Their mission: "EIG is the premier independent professional services firm specializing in simultaneously improving IVR utilization and customer satisfaction." EIG helps plan, design, and test IVR and automated speech recognition applications, among other services.

We asked EIG's president and co-founder Rex Stringham a few questions about hosted speech recognition services, and he responded via e-mail.

The Call Center Steel Cage Death Match blog has a great post on falling asleep on the job, inspired by some news from Australia about a police emergency call center agent nodding off. Apparently the supervisor had been up late drinking the night before. He dozed off on a La-Z-Boy.

The Cogitating Manager also mentions a Maryland 911 center agent whose snores can be heard on the recording of the call during which she fell asleep. The post, "Good Night Cube", is a long one with more sleeping-on-the-job stories.

There's a new blog that started just days ago -- Lonesome_Manager's Support Center Arcanum has posted a handful of short observations.

The Anonymous Cog's February 2 post (scroll down) tells a nice tale of a rude caller apologizing.

James Richards' Work Related Blogs and News has a post lining to a strange article from The Scotsman about February 6 being "National Sickie Day." A survey of 4,000 Scottish workers showed that Monday the 6th is "the date when more workers phone or text their boss with a fake illness than on any day of the year."

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

Will the Paul English anti-IVR machine ever stop? He launched a new website today, Gethuman.com, a dedicated forum for his IVR Cheat Sheet, tips on how to get to live agents, and -- best of all -- a full line of gethuman.com merchandise: t-shirts, bumper stickers, mouse pads, and teddy bears. Yes, cute, cuddly, anti-IVR teddy bears.

Coincidentally, we're working on an article for the April issue on Speech Recognition Service Providers. I've talked to a few vendors, and English's latest salvo is the perfect excuse to post some of our conversations with the people who make the systems that irk English so. In this entry, I'll focus on Peter Leppik and his customer satisfaction survey and testing firm, Vocal Laboratories. They don't make speech apps, but they make sure they work right.

The world needs more call center blogs. Do you know of any? Have you thought of writing your own? Let us know.

The once flourishing call center blogosphere is on the wane -- at least by my measure. Here is a list of all the active call center blogs (by agents or managers) that I know of:

• Steel Cage Death Match
  
• Call Centre Diary
  
• Call Center Purgatory
  
• Call Center Blurbs

And here is a list of the dead and dying:

• The Supervisor of Hell (last active in December)
  
• Idiot Savant (active last in November)
  
• Your Call is Very Important to Us (active last in November)
  
• Call Center Redemption (last active in November)
  
• My Worst Call of the Day (active last in October)
  
• Usability Guide (active last in October)
  
• Call Center QA Blues (active last in October)
  
• Get Off My Case (quit the call center to work in a record store)
  
• Phone Rant (active in January, but may have quit the call center)
  
• Pop Dizzy (quit the call center)

What happened to all the blogs? Part of it is the temporary and transitional nature of call center jobs, particularly for agents (as opposed to managers). Another reason, which becomes obvious when you look at the final posts of the old blogs, is the stress of call center work.

Some of these dead blogs are still worth reading. They may never be resurrected but the old stories are there.

Work Related Blogs and News is a blog run by James Richards, a Scottish university lecturer who studies work and work blogs. He has a nice list of blogs by call center workers, police officers, teachers, cab drivers, nurses, and at least one of each from a priest, a lawyer, and a funeral director. Some of them are based in the UK, others America, Canada, Philippines, Japan, etc. Work Related Blogs is updated often and it occasionally includes a tidbit about call centers.