In another one of our interviews for our November CRM deployment case studies article, I spoke to a couple of big shots at the Horizon Health call center in the Dallas, Texas area. The call center handles Employee Assistance Program (EAP) calls from its client's workers, who call to talk about mental and emotional health and stress issues.

What stood out most as I spoke to these two, one an IT manager and the other a call center manager, was how well they worked together. They were forced together when their company embarked on a huge call center consolidation, construction, and technology upgrade project. It wasn't easy at first.

Yet another example of the way customer service blunders can become amplified in today's supercharged media environment:

I interviewed Donald Stickney, manager for the City of Minneapolis' 311 call center this week for an article about CRM deployment and I learned some interesting things.

For Minneapolis, the 311 number wasn't just going to relieve the burden on the 911 emergency system. It was going to take the place of about 275 different local phone numbers in the "blue pages" section of the Minneapolis phone book.

The city has a nice 5 minute video describing the goals and implementation of the 311 system on its website: City of Minneapolis 311 video. The video, in which Mr. Stickney talks about the new service, is a helpful overview of what a 311 system can do in general.

The beauty of Minneapolis' system is that calls are answered by live operators who, instead of transfering calls to other departments, fill out reports and give callers tracking numbers. Simple information requests can be handled with the help of a knowledge base. This gives citizens a greater amount of control. It really opens the city's dozens of departments up.

The most novel thing about 311 lines to me is the way they tend to use live agents instead of IVRs. I'm so accustomed to automation now that I was actually surprised when Mr. Stickney told me that the city expected to answer calls with human beings.

This is an odd model of efficiency for a bureaucracy. Odd because we used to expect this kind of transparency and smooth operation from money-making businesses. It's ironic to me then, that businesses -- and I'm thinking about non-municipal utilities like cable companies and mobile phone service providers -- have lots to learn about service and efficiency from city governments.

The weekly call center report is back. This week: news from the Philippines, Texas, Ohio, Kentucky, and more.

I came across an article from Pizza Marketplace.com about a Dayton, Ohio pizza delivery chain that went from answering phones locally in its 36 shops to one centralized call center. Pizza delivery call centers are a strange and fascinating vertical we seldom talk about.

From our renowned QueueTips section, another weekly selection of hard questions and good advice:

Peter Leppik of VocaLabs, the Minneapolis-based customer satisfaction survey firm, gave me a copy of his book Gourmet Customer Service: A Scientific Approach to Improving the Caller Experience at the Seattle ACCE show last week. I've been thumbing through it, and I've found some gems in the glossary:

The Daily News has a short piece on some of the weird calls that come into the NYC 311 center. The highlights:

I've been meaning for some time to write about a presentation given at the Offshore Conference in June by Peter Ryan of Datamonitor. Sitting here almost three months after the fact, looking at the printouts of his slides, I'm still amazed at the richness of the data.

In June I visited Cairo, Egypt for a conference and series of call center site visits.

The Anonymous Cog, that cogitating call center manager -- and the best call center agent/blogger blogging today -- has hung up the headset. No more blogging about the call center.

After "655 posts, 2 years, 7 months, 3 days-I've had enough..." the Cog wrote in his final post. "I'm ready to live life, and there's no room for Call Center Purgatory anymore. It takes too much time, and has become counter productive."

The Cog blogged about more than just call center work. His blog was often quite personal. The last few months' entries have been dedicated to his very personal spiritual serial novel -- something that had little to do with call centers.

But his call center writing was solid. For some reason almost all of his entries over the two years he blogged were posted at 1:23AM. He had a long list of readers in and outside the call center business. For all, his posts on the ups and downs of answering phones all day were both an education and a therapy session. We'll miss his wit and his observations. That sounds like a eulogy. He's quite alive, and he's decided to keep his blog up on the web for a while. He'll even answer e-mails, he says. But no more posts.

Here are a few of his best:

• How to truly piss a customer off
  
• 45 Minutes!!
  
• The Squeaky Wheel
  
• Call Centers Mean Never Having to Say "You're Sorry"
  
• Lies That Never Work
  
• "But You've Got to Help Me! I'm Pathetic, Don't You See?"
  
• Oh, Please, Oh Please Mr. Customer, Please Don't Threaten Me!
  
• Desperation around me...
  

Dell is starting to read -- and respond to -- blogs now. Spokesman Jess Blackburn told the UK Guardian, "We do try to stay alert to what's being posted out there about Dell -- although we only respond when we think there are completely inaccurate reports and misinformation." This after video of exploding laptop batteries circlulated the Internet.

According to the Guardian more companies are (slowly) discovering that if they don't listen to their customers up front, their customers will talk to each other -- and the world -- via blogs. Their answer? Start reading blogs.

Starting this week, a new feature... we're highlighting the best call center tips from our awesome QueueTips message boards.

Yes, even weekly updates needs breaks. The illustrious call center report is back from a relaxing summer vacation with news from Scotland, England, Canada, Florida, and more.

As I write this I'm taking an online survey. Paul English's gethuman.com webite has sent out a Survey Monkey survey in an effort to track some consumer preferences regarding IVRs.

As most readers now know, Paul English has united with Microsoft and Nuance to come up with what amounts to some best practices in IVR design. It is the triad's hope that the call centers that use IVRs will opt in to this list of best practices, and that they will become industry standards. Those who choose to join will get to use a little jingle or "earcon," a chime that callers will hear when they call Get Human-compliant call centers. But now back to our survey.