Canadian radio journalist Jacques Poitras did a three part series on Indian outsourcing last month: "My reasoning was simple," he writes on the CBC News website. "In the 1990s, the government of New Brunswick attracted many call centers to New Brunswick, to both create jobs and to try to lay the foundation for our own information-technology sector. Now India appeared to represent a growing competitive threat to those efforts."

Poitras went to Bangalore for a week to learn about New Brunswick's competition in the global outsourcing trade. Can a Canadian province, now in the "mature" phase of its call center growth compete with a country that boasts high education and English skills with rock-bottom wages?

Part three of the series focuses on near-shoring in Canada. Unfortunately for New Brunswick's call centers, "Part of Canada's near-shore appeal is as a trial run," says Poitras, "for clients who want to get the hang of outsourcing before they move their work totally off shore." However, near-shoring is predicted to triple before 2010, he says.

Where do you stand on off-shoring vs. near-shoring? Should North America try to compete with the Indian outsourcing juggernaut? Tell us what you think.

All three of Poitras' radio segments (which average seven minutes each) can be heard on the CBC Web site.

Here is your weekly update on the call centers that are opening, closing, and making news worldwide. And don't forget to check our 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.

We got a big response to our Taylorism and the Modern Call Center blog entry. We asked whether or not readers thought using scripts in call centers were helpful for creating efficiency and consistency. Every reader who e-mailed us thought scripts were detrimental. Here's a sampling:

Todd Beck, Senior Product Manager for AchieveGlobal wrote:

"One of my favorite "scripts" stories comes from a company whose new senior executive stopped by to listen to a few calls. An irate customer screamed at the agent that, "Every time I call you guys, you make the problem worse." As coached (and rewarded), the agent carefully followed the script by reading the next prescribed phrase: "I can help you with that." Fortunately for AchieveGlobal, the executive immediately threw out the scripts, fired his training vendor, and called us the next day to train his reps on a more attentive style of service.

Scripts are like krypton to any stellar service initiative. By preventing the service provider from responding to the unique combination of each customer, each call, and each service provider’s own personality, scripts ensure mediocrity. Perhaps worst of all, scripts eliminate the service provider’s personal accountability. We know call center reps are smarter than that. Why constrain them to the lowest-common denominator?"

Reader Linda Goff wrote:

"After years in the call center industry, I would have to agree that scripting dumbs down not only the rep, but the caller. Feedback from callers in the last three centers I worked for was negative....It's hard to tell which customers dislike more - the scripting or the voice recognition."

And finally, solutions consultant Johnny Roland told us:

"Interesting conversation. If the key metric for call centers is solving the customer's problem on the first call, then listening, troubleshooting, and orchestrating a response are the primary skills needed. The scripted call is usually a thinly veiled attempt to sell something to the customer -- a tactic most consumers see through right away. It is an artificial way to try to create a "relationship" between two people who don't know each other. The customer dials a number and gets an "advisor" on the phone who is looking at a CTI screen pop that paints a picture of "who" this customer is. Always an incomplete picture. And it's a relationship that will only last a few minutes."

The Pennsylvania engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote in 1911 that the typical iron worker was as dumb as an ox, and that people who had repetitive jobs worked at the slowest rate they could get away with. Taylor came up with a system for tasks to be broken down to simple parts that didn't require any thought. Thought would be left to the supervisors. This is what is now known as Taylorism.

In an article a few years ago, Adria Scharf, co-editor of Dollars & Sense compared today's scripts -- 'thank you for calling ___, how may I help you?' and others found in a call center -- to yesterday's Taylorism: "Scripted talk is more than just an annoying quirk of the modern service economy. It represents a deep form of managerial control -- a regimentation of the labor process so total that it extends even to speech. Scripts are a fact of life for retail and service workers whose employers make use of a time-worn early-20th century managerial strategy: Taylorism."

But aren't scripts necessary to keep agents and other workers efficient and consistent? Or are they really a modern-day Taylorism, a system that assumes workers are dim-witted and lazy?

In January, we reported that Lloyds TSB, the UK bank, found that scripts annoyed customers who called its information line. Nine out of ten callers didn't like scripts. Further, 60% of callers didn't feel like their questions were answered and 55% said they weren't being listened to when scripts were used.

Scharf says the scripted call (and even the recorded/monitored call) is often bad for morale. The Communications Workers of America union says that monitoring should only be used for targeting training, never for punishment.

Studies by Cornell economist Rosemary Batt showed that when call centers used self-managed teams, they performed better than groups with rigid oversight. What do you think? Tell us.

The Call Center Report skipped a week on account of a lack of news. So here's two, that's right, two weeks in one. And don't forget to check 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.

I found two recent news articles on the homesourcing trend. One, from a Pennsylvania paper called the Times Leader follows a rural Minnesota woman who was tired of commuting 40 miles to work.

(it contains a gross geographical error -- she couldn't have commuted 40 miles to Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is at least 400, not 40 miles from any given point in Minnesota. The article meant Grand Rapids, Minnesota, birthplace of Judy Garland.)

So 25 year old Kathleen Hughes got a job as an agent in a virtual call center, becoming "part of a growing legion of so-called cyberagents, the ranks of which are expected to grow at a clip of more than 20 percent annually as companies continue to move work away from traditional brick-and-mortar call centers to lower-cost centers that tap into workers’ homes."

The article quoted statistics from IDC, a research and consulting firm: America's 112,000 home-based agents will triple in numbers by 2010.

In some ways, this trend isn't so good for the worker. The agent seldom gets benefits. Some employers insist agents train off the clock and some charge for training. Agents are often independent contractors, meaning they must have their own computer, phone line, and internet service.

The other article comes from the Salt Lake Tribune. It profiles a company called O'Currance Teleservices, a Salt Lake City outsourcer.

David Meine, an EVP at O'Currance, said that productivity seemed to go up 15% when agents worked from home. Agents must work at O'Currance's call centers for a few months before they can work from home.

Do you have any opinions about homesourcing? Do you work from home? Do you supervise or train home-based agents? Tell us about it.

National Public Radio had a nice five minute segment on call centers during its Morning Edition show late February called Call Center Outsourcing Slows (click the link to hear the story).

The show's host introduced the story: "Over the past few years some US companies have been closing their domestic call centers and relocating them to low wage countries like India. Researchers say many more companies are resisting that trend. Despite huge savings these companies say some call center jobs are ill-suited to overseas workers. Many companies have found an alternative to outsourcing: hiring workers who answer calls from their homes."

NPR's Jim Zarroli spoke to AAA EVP David Hughes, who told him that the company has never considered outsourcing calls overseas -- roadside assistance calls are too sensitive for someone who isn't familiar with American roads and driving problems.

He also spoke to Rosemary Batt, an associate professor of Human Resource Studies at Cornell University. She surveyed nearly 500 call centers, and says that there are still about four million call center jobs in America and only a "steady trickle" are being created in other countries (about 400,000 in India).

Batt said that it was the simple transactions that got outsourced the most. Credit card activation or telemarketing.

And then the topic turned to "homesourcing." Zarroli visited Jim Miller in the agent's office -- his bedroom in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Our Joe Fleischer hosted a webcast yesterday called "Making At Home Agents Work." You can access the archived version of the one-hour seminar with Oracle/Siebel about homesourcing here.

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One of the more interesting reader comments we got to our question about whether the call center (in general) should report into marketing or operations:

It probably depends on what purpose the Contact Center is serving.... [W]e are funded by marketing.

You know, marketing is better funded than most divisions, (Ops, f'rinstance) because that's where the money comes from. There will be more money available for people and Contact Center equipment & software if funded by marketing.

If the bank's Contact Center was funded by marketing, the agents would try to push more banking functions (mutual funds, i.e.) when a customer calls to see if a deposit was made on time. It would bring more money into the bank with the resulting benefits for all.

Any more thoughts?

In the latest issue of Harper's, senior editor Bill Wasik reveals that he was the guy who started the "flash mob" phenomenon. A flash mob, if you missed the media coverage, was (as Wasik quotes from the Oxford English Dictionary) “a public gathering of complete strangers, organized via the Internet or mobile phone, who perform a pointless act and then disperse again.” (See this Wikipedia definition for more) Wasik says the whole thing was a big joke, a commentary on fads and "intended as a metaphor for the hollow hipster culture that spawned it." The climax (and death) of the fad was to be the moment when corporate America adopted the fad to market a product. Ford finally did it -- a year or so after the fad died, Wasik says -- to market the Ford Fusion.

This is a long-winded way of introducing some call center blogs -- corporate blogs. Blogs at their best are stream of consciousness screeds by regular people. It seems that the natural progression of any organic trend is for it to become codified and inorganic. What starts with an enthusiast blogging about technology inevitably spawns blogs produced by the companies who make that technology.

Is the mobile phone industry finally stooping to improve their legendary lackadaisical customer service? Maybe. But has anyone noticed yet?

"Their collective mediocrity is becoming more costly as customers leave each month by the hundreds of thousands. Now that most Americans own cellphones, growth for mobile carriers means not just finding new subscribers but holding onto existing ones," writes Matt Richtel in the New York Times.

A rather large dose 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.

That's what consumers are telling call center operators in the UK, according to a recent survey.

British consumers rate the performance of call centers as "modest" at most. This was the finding of a spot satisfaction study of over 300 customers in Greater London conducted by market research firm Metric (UK) Ltd during December 2005. All respondents had used the call centre they rated during the week preceding the interview. Overall consumer satisfaction ranked as six on a ten point scale. Women and under-55s were the least satisfied with the performance of call centers.

The study further revealed that women's dissatisfaction was largely aimed at the call centre agents - with particular aspects having shortcomings cited as "agents are polite and friendly / not robots", "agents being concerned about the customer's issue", etc. Consumers aged 55+ were more dissatisfied with “agent being polite and friendly”, "feeling secure about personal information shared" and "need to wait due to computer problems".

The researchers add this interesting thought about the psychology of providing customer service:

"A collective look at the attributes on which women are significantly dissatisfied leads to a strong conjecture of a gender bias in operation on the part of male agents. When Metric quizzed about this to some Call Center experts they did not rule out the possibility but sighted another more generous to agent explanation. In their opinion when a woman calls it is a social plus business call for her. Unlike her male counterpart, she does not like to restrict herself to the business on hand only. She perhaps wants to share a few more things which the agents are neither trained nor allowed to indulge in. One interesting revelation from this study is the prime importance of the human component. The study indicated that the human component accounts for close to half of total satisfaction followed by system and technology issues which together with human component account for 64 % of the variation. Ironically what seems to be the highest customer priority is an area where call center performance is relatively weakest."

The company that did the survey is available here. There were some interesting methodological quirks to the research, which we're looking into; more to be posted here as we find out how the survey was conducted.

Just minutes after writing that last entry I stumbled across Jeff Pulver's ode to the state of the telecom industry. It's a Suessian hoot, and yes, it's in verse. Rhyming verse.

Baby Bells: Grow up with Dr. Seuss

Well done, Jeff!

Let them merge. Let them try to recapture some of the momentum, market share, technological innovation. It won't matter.

It wouldn't matter if every telecom company in the world banded together now, trying to stave off the inevitable. The fact remains that it is inevitable. There is no economic model I can see that allows for the persistence of regulated common carriers in an IP world. Whatever replaces it, and there are as many options as you can imagine, the attempt to recreate "big" telecom is a sign of the nearing end of the line for those companies.

Ten years from now, the venerable brand may survive, but I'll bet anything that the AT&T of 2016 isn't in the delivery business at all.

What's the best structure for a call center in an organization? Should it report into Marketing? Or Operations?

I've been thinking about this for some time, letting the question percolate in the back of my mind, and I still don't have a clear cut answer. You can make a good case for either model. But, I think I'm detecting a transition from ops to marketing - and this is borne out in conversations I have with vendors. For example, execs at Kana told me last week that increasingly when they make sales pitches for call center equipment and software, they are focusing their attention on the executive managerial level that makes strategy decisions.... So deployment of call center technology is more of a strategic decision than a reactive one.

Like I said, I don't have a fully formed mental picture of where this is all going, so I strongly invite input. What's the best model for fitting a call center into an organization? What should the reporting structure and lines of responsibility be like? Who should be in charge?

And how is the "should be" different from the "is"? Are the wrong people running your center?

Tell me, and tell the industry: kdawson@cmp.com.

Interested in what's going on with at-home call center agents? Then sign up for our free Webcast about how to get the most from employing agents who work from their homes. The hour-long Webcast is on Wednesday, March 15th, beginning at noon Eastern time.

Also check out Harry Sheff's news brief from March 1st of this year, as well as "Employing Agents Who Are Outta Sight," from Call Center Magazine's July 2002 issue.

Some of the names of people, names of companies and details about agents' compensation have changed since "Employing Agents Who Are Outta Sight" first appeared, but many of the observations in this piece about work-at-home call center agents still hold true today.

In my Are You Getting Tired of Paul English Yet? post earlier this week, I blogged about Fast Company editor William C. Taylor's New York Times article on Paul English and IVRs.

Ted Hopton, membership director at our partner, the Incoming Calls Management Institute (ICMI), saw the Taylor article too and pointed out (in the ICMI member forum) Fast Company's blog and an old-but-good article on call centers. For the benefit of our readers who don't know about ICMI, or aren't members, here's a quick list of some of Fast Company's call center related content.