I'm not the only one who thought Skype's claim of nearly 100 million users was a bit high. Wall Street Journal tech writer Jeremy Wagstaff blogged about it, asking "Where the hell are they?"

Big news today - NICE Systems announced it's buying two American call center software vendors, IEX and Performix.

What are we to make of this?

In this week's update on the call centers that are opening, closing, and making news worldwide: Mostly domestic news and one item from China.

Did you know that Call Center Magazine, that old print stalwart, is available worldwide as in an optional digital version that's exactly 100% identical to the paper-based model delivered to US subscribers?

Starting just a few months ago, we began an experiment in digital delivery... our subscribers (who we love, love, love!) now have a choice. They can read the magazine the old way, on shiny colored paper that they can take on the train or to the lunch counter - or they can click through to an exact digital copy of the magazine, delivered to them via an email once a month. Read it onscreen, print out pages, and so on. Same great content, different delivery method. Your choice.

One of the nice things about this is that we can now offer exactly the same magazine to our colleagues outside the United States - and there are a lot of you. If you're interested in reading Call Center Magazine digitally, wherever you happen to be located, try our new digital edition. You can change your subscription, or start up a new one, at this page: http://www.submag.com/sub/ca.

The Consumerist blog continues its "Time to a Human" series with banks. Consumerist lackies have been phoning the call centers of 19 banks for the last four days, recording the hold times. Every time they do these surveys, the most notable thing is the one or two companies that have real trouble getting to the phones. Everyone else is clustered around 0-3 minutes of hold time per call.

So what do these surveys measure? Not much. We could try to tell you that Citibank must have a really overworked call center because they kept the Consumerist folks on hold for four minutes, but that's probably not true. The bar graph makes Citibank and US Bank look pretty bad, but the fact is, any wait under five minutes in barely noticeable.

In fact, look at day three: all wait times were under one minute, fifty five seconds. So the fact that MBNA had the longest time is meaningless.

On day two, Fidelity was last, with a mind-numbing three minute and twenty one second wait. And yet they gave the shortest wait on day four!

[We also blogged their previous surveys on airlines and mobile phone companies]

VocaLabs' SectorPulse reports on the mobile phone and financial industries, the latest of which are out now, are done using VocaLabs stable of panelists, who report quarterly on their personal experiences with their phone companies and banks.

Once again, Washington Mutual wallops the other institutions in customer satisfaction. And Citibank looks like it's been on a gentle slope to a zero customer satisfaction score from December to March. They actually appear to hit zero at the end of the quarter. What happened?

Call completion is a factor. VocaLabs' Peter Leppik said in a press release: "The continuing poor grades for Call Completion remain troubling in this industry. Repeat calls to complete a single piece of business frustrates customers and negatively impacts the financial performance of a customer service operation. Across all the financial services companies for which we have data, about one customer in three must call more than once, an unnecessary burden on both the customer and the company."

For the mobile phone industry survey, Verizon and T-Mobile are both doing very well in customer satisfaction. Per usual, Sprint PCS is doing terribly. Cingular struggles -- mostly successfully -- to overcome the poor ratings it inherited from joining AT&T.

[We blogged on the last SectorPulse report here.]

If you want to ensure that agents understand their workloads in the context of the workload of the entire center – whether agents' jobs involve taking orders or resolving requests for support – few tools are more useful and reliable than electronic displays. But what if your space can't accommodate them?

This question came up during a conversation I had yesterday afternoon with a manufacturer of electronic displays.

Some call centers are located in buildings where, for example, columns obstruct agents' views of displays, or where agents' cubicles have high walls.

The person I spoke with pointed out that when a large display isn't the best option for presenting information that agents need to do their jobs, it's often a good idea to show the information on agents' desktops.

And, he added, even when your space does allow you to install a large display that lots of agents can view at the same time, it's still worthwhile to present statistics for individual agents, and the groups they're part of, on agents' desktops.

How does your call center disseminate information among agents? I invite you to e-mail me to share what works for you.

In this week's update on the call centers that are opening, closing, and making news worldwide: Bank of America expands a call center instead of closing it? It's true! Also -- openings in Malaysia, New Zealand, Ghana, Zambia, Wales, and Estonia.

In Part One of our two part series, we compiled our best articles on headsets for call centers. This installment will focus on facilities design -- a fundamental issue we don't often cover.

Continuing with its "Time to a Human" series, the Consumerist blog surveys airline call centers. Today, day four of the week-long survey finds Midwest at the bottom again. The Consumerist says the airline's fifteen minute wait is actually an improvement. Compare that to every other airline where between one and two minutes was the norm and seven minutes (United and Alaska) was long.

On day three Alaska was second to last with about a five minute hold-time, and Midwest kept them waiting nearly 22 minutes.

Day two was much like the others, except this time United was second to worst. Midwest clocked in at 19 minutes.

Day one: Midwest, 15 minutes; Alaska, 9 minutes. Rumor has it, Midwest serves fresh-baked cookies on board. Have they got their priorities straight? Maybe!

The other airlines surveyed were Southwest, Jet Blue, Continental, American, US Airways, Northwest, Air Canada, Delta, Airtran, Spirit Air, and Lufthansa. Their times are barely worth talking about because they were all clustered between 30 seconds and two minutes. Only the deviations and extremes are interesting.

We talked about Consumerist's mobile phone co. call center "Time to a Human" survey in an earlier blog -- it turns out Nextel won that battle. Here are the results.

And yes, Consumerist callers did use Gethuman.com to bypass the IVRs.

Last December I wrote about blogger Seth Godin's wacky idea for call centers to reward customers for calling during busy times. The IVR would capture the caller's information, and an agent would call back when they could. But the caller would also get $20 for the trouble. Godin talks about the potential for "dramatically increasing customer joy."

I thought it was a stupid idea then, and I still do. Here's why: I just called the travel call center for our company. I had to make arrangements to get to our Call Center Demo & Conference in Orlando in May. All operators were busy, but within 20 seconds, a woman came on the line and took my name and number so they could call me back when they weren't busy. What I'm saying is that Godin's idea is being used, but without the silly $20.

They called me back in about an hour. Why would I need any money for that? I was on hold for all of 20 seconds. The reward was avoiding the queue. Why don't more call centers do this? If you know, tell me.

In this week's update on the call centers that are opening, closing, and making news worldwide: Bank of America shuts down three 600+ agent call centers, plains state senators battle for an Airforce call center, and Royal Caribbean opens a call center shaped like a cruise ship.

We're always excited to see call centers covered in major newspapers. But when our editors are quoted, we're thrilled. Our chief technical editor Joe Fleischer was quoted today in an article in the New York Times' Technology section called The Long-Distance Journey of a Fast-Food Order.

McDonald's has been testing the use of call centers to take drive-through orders at about 50 nationwide locations. One center, run by Bronco Communications in Santa Maria, California, serves customers in line at McDonald's locations as far away as Hawaii.

Here are a few new and noteworthy blogs and blog posts I've come across lately -- most of them corporate, but all of them interesting.

Someone in my family works for a call center run by a non-profit foundation. The agents in her center interview senior citizens -- people who are often hard of hearing. The center is moving to a new location and the agents are concerned that the new space, which is rumored to have an "open, ecological design," will make those interviews difficult. If the agents can't have their own offices to conduct phone interviews, how can they make sure that they don't disrupt each other with all the shouting they have to do to be heard by the seniors they're talking to? I thought I'd let our readers take a stab at it, and then post some of Call Center's articles on the subject.

Does anyone out there have any advice about headsets for a loud, small call center? Tell us how you like your headsets.

Here's some of what Call Center Magazine has said about headsets:

In a previous post, we linked to CBC Radio's series on Indian outsourcing. Journalist Jacques Poitras compared India's mammoth growing market to Canada's more stable market (stable being a euphemism for stagnant).

Datamonitor just released a report called Selling Canada as a Nearshore Option which says that while "Canada's domestic and offshore outsourced total agent positions will increase through 2010," growth in agent positions will go down.

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.