The Australian call center news website callcentres.net has a new blog called Your Call. So far there seems to be two posts -- one about CRM software and one about a Talisma event in Miami. Callcentres.net is based in Sydney, and they have an outpost in Singapore. They cover parts of Asia as well as Australia, and if they keep the blog up, it may be a good source of information for that part of the world.

The Consumerist blog posted a nifty little chart showing how long it took them to reach a person when calling a variety of mobile phone companies. Nextel and Verizon were the quickest -- both under a minute. Sprint was by far the worst: they had to wait more than six minutes to reach someone. All other providers hovered at or below the two and half minute mark. It looks like Consumerist bloggers are doing this for a week.

Compare those (admittedly unscientific) results to VocaLabs' quarterly reports on the mobile phone industry. Last quarter's report had Sprint at the very bottom of VocaLabs' "raw satisfaction score," and Verizon was at the top, trailed closely by T-Mobile. In the newsletter that report appeared in, VocaLabs' Rick Rappe wrote:

Sprint's performance for caller frustration has been at or near the bottom in all our studies, and a significant percent of Sprint customers tell us they are less loyal after contacting customer service than before they made the call. We suspect that Sprint has made the common mistake of trying to save money by making it harder to reach an agent--a strategy which often backfires.

Makes you wonder. Why don't they learn?

Speaking of VocaLabs, one of their latest blog entries was a list of the Top Ten Most Annoying Recorded Messages. My favorite is number two: "We are experiencing unusually high call volumes," to which VocaLabs' Peter Leppik writes: "…this would be ok during those occasional moments when a company really is flooded with calls. But after a month you don't have a call-volume problem, you've got a too-cheap-to-hire-enough-agents problem."

In another post, Leppik linked to The Trademark Blog, which had an entry about a bizarre exchange the blogger had with his phone company. It culminates in the blogger requesting the company downgrade his service in order to take advantage of shorter wait times. It only makes sense in customer service hell.