This week: a double issue with news, openings, and closings from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Jamaica, and America.

Sometimes the Voice of the Customer isn't the one you should be listening to. Here's a quote from an article in Time magazine about Nintendo's product development (via the Signal vs Noise blog):

Nintendo has grasped two important notions that have eluded its competitors. The first is, Don’t listen to your customers. The hard-core gaming community is extremely vocal — they blog a lot — but if Nintendo kept listening to them, hard-core gamers would be the only audience it ever had. “[Wii] was unimaginable for them,” Iwata says. “And because it was unimaginable, they could not say that they wanted it. If you are simply listening to requests from the customer, you can satisfy their needs, but you can never surprise them. Sony and Microsoft make daily-necessity kinds of things. They have to listen to the needs of the customers and try to comply with their requests. That kind of approach has been deeply ingrained in their minds.

The point is, I guess, that sometimes listening to the voice of the customer can be like listening to an echo chamber that reinforces things you already know, or are inclined to hear. A little counterexample for all those VoC fanatics out there...

I got an email from a vendor today, a very typical research type of email asking for my thoughts on general trends: "Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories is curious, what does a contact center technology reporter/editor such as yourself think are the critical business issues facing contact centers today?" I went ahead and answered it, but then I realized that though I like the folks at Genesys, they shouldn't have a monopoly on my thinking on such a broad subject. So here, basically, is what I told them:

1. Collaboration and communication between the call center management and the rest of the organization, particularly IT, HR and finance. Issues of culture and turf come into play, but are exacerbated by differences in the kinds of metrics each wing of the business finds meaningful; there are communication gaps all over. Add to that a lack of clear understanding of the center's role, and the varying criteria for "success" and you have a mess.

2. Analytics and measurement technologies that rely on activity from the switch, hence that are derived from call handling stats, instead of measures that are based on real value of customers, profits, revenues, etc. Flawed metrics play into the communications gap in 1, above.

3. Lack of understanding inside the center of the importance of agents to the health of the customer relationship. Most companies don't know how to assign a value to the customer relationship except on a broad scale; and hence don't know how to quantify the cost/value/profit potential innate in each interaction. So they also don't know how to prioritize resources to their most important customers, and don't know how to allocated call center resources (training, etc.) to agents that are most likely to facilitate longer customer tenure, cross- or up-sell opportunities, and the like.

Does anyone have any more pressing issues? I think these three are pretty key, but I'd be interested in hearing from people who think this is way off. Note, also that the question was phrased to ask about business issues - I deliberately answered it that way, leaving aside some pure technology issues that I know people are wrestling with, like the deployment of IP.

The New York Times reports that India may be shifting from technology outsourcing to manufacturing.

Reporter Anand Giridharadas writes: "India's emergence as a manufacturing hub comes as multinationals look for alternatives to China. A talent shortage is lifting wages there, and that could make Chinese goods costlier and help India compete against China's smooth and comprehensive infrastructure, an advantage that reduces its cost of production."

Victoria's Secret, Nokia, and BMW are among the companies investing in India-based manufacturing.

What does this mean for call center outsourcing? Is the quiet news of call center repatriation an omen? Is India slowly repositioning itself? Good questions, but with companies like Apple expanding into India and Dell increasing its India force by 5,000, call center outsourcing isn't going away soon.

I'm back from Orlando and I've got a pile of glossy brochures, stacks of demo cd-roms, and the same pale complexion I left with. No time in the sun for me; no, I spent my time touring the massive Connextions call center compound and roaming the show floor in search of unique call center ideas -- far from the jaws of hungry alligators.

The Call Center editorial team is going to be travelling to Orlando next week to participate in this year's Call Center Demo Conference. For my part, I'll be on an exciting panel called 60 Ideas in 60 Minutes with three other industry luminaries (Greg Levin, Jay Minucci and Gerry Barber).

Each of us will present 15 ideas for making the call center more effective - ideas that you can implement right away, sometimes without much cost. I've seen the ideas that the other three gentlemen are bringing: bring extra pens and paper cause there's so much knowledge gonna happen in that room you're gonna want to take good good notes. That panel is taking place next Tuesday (5/16) at 1:15 pm.

Here's one of my ideas that has particular relevance in a trade show context:

Idea #15: When talking to a vendor, ask them this: "What specific experience do you personally have in your past that makes me think I can trust you to understand my call center problems. Did you work in a call center?" You'll probably be surprised by the answers you get.

There's 59 more to come.

In this week's update on the call centers that are opening, closing, and making news worldwide: Dell is hiring 1,000 in Canada, UK cable co NTL is firing 4,000, and Nicaragua opens a center without any clients.

In this week's update on the call centers that are opening, closing, and making news worldwide: Verizon is making big cuts after its MCI buy, Belfast is reeling after Prudential announces a big closing, and UK marketer LBM offers to pick up a third of Prudential's victims.

I haven't received a phone call from a telemarketer in years. Part of that is because I don't have a land line at home. But outgoing call centers are a dying breed. There was a time, I'm told, when this magazine was called "Inbound/Outbound." Now, as inbound call centers multiply exponentially, The Do Not Call List has all but vanquished the old outbound telemarketing industry.

Every once in a while though, we hear a muted peep from the margins. This time, it came from a New Jersey ad agency via Advertising Age magazine. Critic Bob Garfield reviews a series of telemarketing phone spots aimed at businesses. As I understand it, the Hoboken-based ad agency Hammerhead created pre-recorded skits that get played over the phone to potential clients -- businesses.

Today we try something editorially that we've never done before. It's May 1, and as always on the first of the month, our latest issue goes live on the website at www.callcentermagazine.com. We know that a monthly "issue" doesn't mean as much as it used to in these web days.

So here's what we're doing. You can still read the entire text of the current May issue of Call Center Magazine.

But you can also read the text of every interview we did for one of the features in it, our article about Hosted Tools. You can see how each vendor answered each question, through more than 20,000 words of material. Naturally we can only select choice bits for the print edition of the magazine. But online, there's no reason why someone with a really powerful need to learn as much as possible about hosting shouldn't have access to every bit of research we can gather.

Each interview is listed on the Current Issue page. Take a look - it's a fascinating insight into how vendors think. We're going to be doing more of this kind of thing, so tell us what you think of it. Still to come, the background info for our Workforce Management articles, and in the coming weeks a blizzard of data from our June feature on IP and Call Routing. We won't make you wait till June 1 for that, there's no reason web readers can't have at it early.

Here they are:

The Verint Interview
The UCN Interview
The TeleTech Interview
The Telephony@Work Interview
The Sento Interview
The Pipkins Interview
The Five9 Interview
The Customer Relationship Metrics Interview
The Cosmocom Interview
The BeVocal Interview
The Aspect Interview
The Echopass Interview