I just had a curious thought.... are there any cases of companies that wanted to use a hosted application for something in their call center, but couldn't because they were afraid of the Sarbanes Oxley repercussions? Please let me know.

From Richard Snow, an analyst at Ventana Research, comes this take on the current state of the CRM technology landscape:

Inspired by his teenage son's surprisingly large cell phone bill, Jay Minucci has a few thoughts on text messaging -- a guest post by ICMI's vice president of consulting services.

One of our friends from Opus Research sent us an interesting eyewitness account from a speech recognition tech event in New York.

Dan Miller, Opus's senior analyst, gave his take on Microsoft and Nuance's latest movie with Paul English -- we reprint it here (with permission) from its original source at the Opus Research website:

CBS News went to the SpeechTek trade show here in New York last week, and so did we. Sometimes it's fun to hear national news sources' take on the call center industry -- it can be both edifying and discomfiting -- but in this case CBS missed the point.

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."

Several experts list some of the more common errors along with a few best practices for quality monitoring.

We asked four vendor representatives two questions: what are some of the most common mistakes call centers make with their quality monitoring program? And what are some quality monitoring best practices?

Shelley Veazie, Director of Marketing Communication, CTI Group:

Call Center administrators rarely work to improve the moral of their employees. Their monitoring techniques seem too restricting; too much like 'Big Brother.' Happy and informed employees will work harder and be more productive.

Some call centers do not properly define procedures and guidelines for communication expectations of their employees.

Some administrators waste too much time by trying to manually monitor their employees by walking around the office.

The best practice for call center administrators is to create a policy and stick with it. Define your communication policy from customer service to performance expectations. Do not limit your employees by spending too much time looking over their heads and micromanaging. Define expectations and hold them accountable.