The latest in call center openings and closings from around the world.

Knoll is (along with Interior Concepts -- see our previous Q&A) one of the few office outfitters that design cubicle and workspace systems specifically for call centers. We asked Christine Barber, Director Workplace Research at Knoll some questions about call center furniture. Look for our facilities and design feature in the August issue.

Call Center Magazine: What design issues are specific to call centers?

Christine Barber: Call center operations are typically fast-paced, pressured and technology and information intensive. These factors result in unique design requirements that can be linked directly to the effectiveness of the call center business. Key issues specific to call center design include:

• Designing call center workplaces to encourage teamwork and communication.
  
• Providing workplace solutions that ensure proper ergonomic support for worker health, safety, comfort and productivity.
  
• Creating workplaces designed with visual interest and appeal for branding and employee attraction and retention purposes.
  
• Ensuring that furniture solutions accommodate and support state-of-the art technologies.
  
• Designing call center workplaces to support 24/7 operations. This requires the addition of amenities to support work/life balance such as food service, break areas, exercise facilities and mothers' room.

What ever happened to Paul English, anyway? The blogger who started an anti-IVR media frenzy has been quiet for a while as the public's interest in his cause wanes. I checked his website, Gethuman.com and found little new content.

But his personal site, the blog where it all started, had a small gem: English writes, "If you are a sales person and you want to cold call me at my company, here are some tips." They're good ones, too. All of them are common sense, but sometimes sales people need to be reminded about how to approach potential clients. English's rule number one: "Concise email. Just send me a brief email telling me what you offer and how it will help me." Read all of his tips here.

Vincent Ferrari, the guy who recorded his account cancellation call to AOL, has been making the talk show rounds. Is Ferrari the next Paul English? Click here to watch his five minute interview with Matt Lauer on the NBC Today Show.

Click here for our blog on the original story and here more AOL horror stories.

We asked Interior Concepts president David Kendrick some questions about call center furniture for our upcoming article on Call Center Facilities Design. Here's a preview of some of that article. Look for more previews in the next week.

Call Center Magazine: What does your company do for call centers that a normal furniture manufacturer doesn't do? What design issues are specific to call centers?

David Kendrick: We specialize in call centers whereas a "normal" furniture manufacturer might adapt their furniture to a call center setting. There is a vast difference in benefits to the customer with the primary benefits being the maximum utilization of floor space, cost-effective wire management and the functionality of the floor space. With our one-inch panel system, coupled with our custom manufacturing approach, we can provide to our customers additional agent stations within the floor plan, increased workspace/aisle space per agent and/or the ability to build/lease less square footage; in any event, this positively impacts the customer's bottom line. As opposed to making furniture fit we specifically design to the space and manufacture accordingly. Our wire management system is the largest and easiest to use in the industry and offers a significant cost savings to our customers. Finally, regarding the functionality of the center, the customer benefits from our many years of experience in designing/space planning call centers: we often win business because we are told we demonstrate more insight with our furniture design/space planning services.

I wasn't very good at math when I was a student. That's always been a great disappointment to me, because being able to intelligently manipulate numbers seems to be one of the great achievements of being human. So while I'm pretty clueless when it comes to the actual use of math, I can appreciate the rigor and beauty of new lines of mathematical analysis. Especially when I understand what's being analyzed, like call center performance.

The new thing I'm going to tell you about is called Multivariable Testing, or MVT. It's complicated - it's all mathy - but it's pretty elegant when you get outside it and see what it can do. Developed by a company called QualPro, it's a method of analyzing the consequences of making many changes at once to a situation.

Two weeks of call center openings and closings from around North America and the world.

There's a ten-seat call center in midtown Manhattan where the agents answer a mere 150 calls a day. They'll tell you the technical term for the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of one's mouth, but they won't help you with your crossword puzzle.

These are the reference librarians at the New York Public Library. Their call center, if you can call it that -- they call it the "telephone reference service" -- is across the street from the main library, the one with the famous lions out front. The library's center was profiled by the New York Times yesterday.

In my last post, I mentioned that there are four components to the business case that Egypt is trying to present to the West, four elements that justify the proposition that you can profitably pursue call center operations there. Four, that is, after you talk about infrastructure. But because we assume that infrastructure is a given, it's these four that act as qualifiers or differentiators between competing locales:

• education
• language
• service culture
• and continuous supply of labor

I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about whether Egypt passes muster in any of these areas; that's too particular a judgement based on any company's matrix of important variables. Every site selection or outsourcing decision is unique, and what's good for you may be inadequate for the company across the street. What I want to note here is that Egypt has intelligently identified these four areas as things they can concentrate on and improve in; and that these represent a good baseline for anyone starting to look at an offshore choice.

It's not enough to be able to assert that you have enough warm bodies to fill your quota of call center jobs today; you have to assure clients that the systems you have in place (the schools, the job training academies, the languages your nation speaks) will provide an ongoing class of eager young workers this year and every year. A country/locale that wants to build an industrial park can find 300 English speaking computer literate workers to fill it without too much trouble. A country that wants to build an industry will have to demonstrate that it's in it for the long haul - that it understands that call center work leads to higher attrition than other industrial or service categories. They'll plan ahead, and devote budgets to education that supports the long term mission of populating the centers. And they'll do it knowing that the jobs may not materialize - they have to take a risk on that, because that's the only way a Western company is going to locate there.

Egypt is trying to demonstrate that commitment in a couple of ways. It's a nation of 70 million, and admittedly a poor country with tourism its number one industry. From a call center point of view, tourism works to Egypt's advantage. It encourages multi-linguality, which the nation has anyway through the legacy of colonialism and the geographic proximity to Europe. It also puts service into the forefront of the nation's economic thinking; both tourism and call centers depend on the success of the customer interaction for their profitability.

Another thing they've done is create a Call Center Academy, funded in part by the government and part by the local outsourcing companies. At present, several hundred people a year are being trained specifically for call center work; the idea is to keep a pipeline flowing of people who know what the work is like, are familiar with the environment, have had their language skills tested and honed. And the outsourcers commit to hiring a certain percentage of the graduates of the program as one of the conditions of the incentives.

What's interesting about this is that it puts the competitive differentiators into the realm of things the local industry can control: people, training, education.... Rather than building a call center and hoping customers come, it puts the onus on the local industry to build a culture of call center behaviour based on demonstrable success criteria. Whether it will work for Egypt - or any other locale, for that matter - is anyone's guess. But it's the beginning of a process that can't bear fruit overnight. I think they're headed in the right direction.

In my next post: My panel at the Offshore Conference... What I said, & what I wished I'd said .... What Peter Ryan said that wow-ed the audience.

The Consumerist blog has another AOL horror story -- this one about a woman trying to cancel her dead father's account. "Is that the only reason?" The agent asked her.

The blog Boing Boing had a post on Wednesday from a guy in the UK who tried to cancel his Sky TV service. The Sky agent: "You want to cancel because it’s too expensive? But everything goes up in price." And: "What do other people in the house watch?" The account was evetually closed.

But wait! There's more: In a post called Canceling Fax Service Like Passing Gallstones, the Consumerist blog tells of a woman who tried to cancel her J2 fax and voicemail service via web chat (she couldn't get through by phone).

Donna Fluss, a consultant and author who writes for Call Center, has just issued an intriguing new white paper on a technique for automated "real-time coaching":

What it is:

"Real-time coaching is an emerging application that literally listens to agents as they handle customer calls and notifies them via screen pop-ups when they make a mistake or miss a step. These applications use speech recognition technology to monitor how agents handle their calls. Real-time coaching is very effective because it enables agents to take corrective action while the customer is still on the line and generally before the customer knows there is a problem."

I think she does a good job in the white paper explaining what the hard and soft ROI factors are, and she includes some pretty useful best practices.

You can read the white paper on her site.

A blogger named Vincent Ferrari posted a recording of the call he made to AOL trying to cancel the account. The Consumerist blog calls it the best thing they've ever posted.

Listen to it. It's an enraging example of how not to handle customers who want to leave. This one will never come back, and by posting the recording on his blog (which has 187 comments and counting) and posting it through Digg (which got 490 comments and counting), he's ensuring that everyone knows how bad AOL's customer service can be.

"It's clear to us from the outside that Egypt has put enormous resources into telecommunication infrastructure, which of course needs to be 100% available." -- Graeme Mair, Oracle, in his presentation at the Offshore Customer Management Conference.

Let's stipulate for a minute that the Friedmanesque world has taken hold and that conditions are (relatively speaking) flat. What does that mean for call centers? And for American companies looking to do business globally? One of the most impressive things about my visit to Egypt was to set foot in actual call centers and see with my own eyes that a) the power stays on, b) the workstations glisten with the cool light of modern, western software, and c) the Internet is widely, deeply, fibrously available. Inside the gates of the call center operations you would never be able to tell - by looking at the infrastructure - that you are not in Phoenix, London or Bangalore. Note that I added India to that sentence there at the last minute. Don't we all take it for granted that the physical underpinnings of call center life - of modern, mechanized and digitized business life in general - are freely available in India? In Manila? In Johannesburg and Dubai? Yeah, we do. Which is my way of acknowledging that the infrastructure is good; it's acceptable; it's not something you need to worry about or even think about beyond the first stage of location assessment. It's flat. You can build a call-center-class industrial park and plop it down just about anywhere on the face of the earth these days. That's what you need to get to the starting line in the race to attact call center business. It's not the finish line.

Mike Trotter, head of the esteemed Center for Customer Driven Quality at Purdue, sent me this definition of what it means to be Customer-Centric.

Being Customer-Centric means the customer is the heart of your business and drives your processes, policies, products and people to all be focused on insuring that any outcome is being created in support of meeting a customer’s needs, demands or expectations. This requires a proactive approach to engaging, listening and responding to customers. The customer-centric company attracts the customer to their products and services by offering an experience that customers desire to be a part of. The company that places itself in the customer’s circumstances in order to design its products, services and processes is customer-centric. Customer-centricity is a convergence of all company resources on the customer.

Maybe every call center manager should have that laminated and put on the wall where they can absorb it.

Egypt has several major call center companies vying for a place in the world outsourcing/offshoring market. During my trip to Cairo, I visited two of them, Xceed and Raya. Both companies had, in recent years, come to America to talk about the work they do and the unique advantages they bring to the marketplace. One of the main reasons I went to Egypt was to see with my own eyes what the situation was on the ground.

Our first visit was to Xceed. A little background: Xceed was founded in 2001; it was (and still is) an offshoot of Telecom Egypt, the national phone company. TE currently owns 98% of the company. From 2001 through the middle of 2003, the bulk of Xceed's revenue came from managing scattered call centers for Telecom Egypt augmented by a bit of IT consulting. As of July, 2003, they moved into their own centralized call center facility and began the process of building up an offshore/outsourced clientele.

In our current print issue, we've got a fascinating feature on call routing, IP-style. We've printed what we thought was the best excerpts from our interviews with industry experts. But online you can read all the material that we left out - it gives a very different picture when you can compare how different people (and companies) answer the same questions.

Today we posted the first in the series of interviews; they'll all be up by the end of the week. Here's the rollout:

Monday - Amcat
Tuesday - Cisco
Wednesday - NICE Systems and Nuasis
Thursday - PAETEC and Spanlink
Friday - Witness Systems

Enjoy them all!

I just returned from a weeklong trip to Egypt - a trip centered around the Offshoring Customer Management International Conference held in Cairo. I went as a delegate, a panelist, a curious sightseer eager to visit an exotic locale. But mostly I went as an observational skeptic: why was Egypt the host of a global call center gathering? Was there substance to their bid to become part of the outsourcing/offshoring equation? What did things look like from the perspective of the American call center industry?

From Lifehacker, the most brilliant IVR tip I've seen in a while....

Many IVR (interactive voice response) systems are programmed to recognize key words. Among those keywords are frequently a list of swear words, like the FCC's dirty 7. When asked to respond, use one of those epithets and you will likely be transferred directly to a live human being.

Woo-hoo! Let's all give it a try.

Dr. Catriona Wallace, director of the Australian call center web journal Callcentres.net used the callcentres.net blog to pose a question to her compatriots down under after she spoke at a Talisma users conference in Miami, Florida: Why do 56% of North American call centers use web chat and e-mail as a customer contact channel while a mere 20% of Australian centers use these modes?

Call center openings and closings from around North America and the world. In this week's news: Apple ditches its India call center plans and HP looks into Bulgaria.