In a story called "Call Center 2.o?" on Forbes.com, reporter Hannah Clark quotes some Accenture survey numbers that don't look too good:

• 48% of American consumers said call center hold times were longer than five minutes; 43% reported the same last year.
• Half of consumers surveyed defected to other brands after bad service.

Much of this article will be old news to contact center insiders, but it's nice to read about our industry in mainstream magazines.

There were some gems within, however:

• Zachary McGeary of Jupiter Research noted that speech-enabled IVRs double the call center's problem-solving rate, but do not increase customer satisfaction. McGeary added that call centers seem to using technology to "keep up with demand, not to stay ahead of it, not to actually improve customer satisfaction."
• Nice Systems gets a nice plug for their speech analytics tools. The article says that technology like this is a great help in finding useful information from call recordings.
• Elizabeth Herrell of Forrester Research says long hold times are agent scheduling problems, or, simply a shortage of agents. She compares a fancy IVR in an understaffed call center to "putting a clean dress on a dirty body ... It's not going to work."