Do you speak Business? We've all had to learn to understand the jargon and cliche-filled jibber-jabber common in most industries today, but do you speak it yourself?

I interviewed an otherwise intelligent and articulate software vendor representative last year who punctuated every other statement with the phrase "At the end of the day ..." He may have even said "At the end of the day, it is what it is." That statement says absolutely nothing.

As a part of our upcoming article on Electronic Displays in the call center, we spoke with NEC Display Solutions' senior product manager, Hans Baumann. We wanted to get the technical dope on displays, particularly the high resolution plasma and LCD displays that are appearing in so many call centers, large and small.

Baumann explained to us some of the mysteries of displays, like burn-in, viewing angle, and glowing phosphors.

What is the life-span of a display monitor?

Hans Baumann, NEC: This is a good question, and it's something that's really not addressed well in our industry because typically the specification is number of hours to half-brightness, and that means typically that's 50,000-60,000 hours a display can be run. The backlight, the fluorescent tubes in the back will only be putting out half as much light as they did when it was new.

That tells you part of the story, but the bigger part of the story [is]: are the other components in the display also designed to last that long? Typically they're not, typically, many display manufacturers spec out 20,000-30,000 hours for the other components.

Whenever I read the papers, especially the business section, I always scan for the words "call center." It's rare these days that I'm rewarded, and when I am it's usually bad news: "Call Center Fails to Save Airline During Crisis," or "Call Center Outsourcing Provokes Angry Mob."

But this week I found a mention of call centers in a very strange place -- in Jay McInerney's review of a couple of books about sushi in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review.

One of the books, The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy, author Sasha Issenberg makes the claim that sushi consumption is, to quote McInerney's review, "a key indicator of modernization, a signifier of participation in the globalized economy."

What is apparently not a true indicator of a full-fledged part in the world economy is running outsourced call centers; once sushi hits big in places like India, says Issenberg, that country "will make a successful claim to a Western ideal of modernity that no number of outsourced call centers can."

The point, I think, is that running call centers for North America and Europe is a way of serving those cultures. For regular Indians to have convenient access to sushi (and everything that comes with bringing fresh fish and exotic foreign preparations and traditions to a country) would make India an equal.

It's exhilarating to imagine the changes that will inevitably come with an India that has equal economic footing with the G-8 nations. Will outsourced customer service and tech support increase or decrease? Will the quality of service get better as Indian agents become more like their Western counterparts, or will it actually get worse?

This is happening, and it's happening now -- and not just in India. China, for instance, is evolving from the country that makes all of our cheap stuff, to a country that competes with us for consumption of all that cheap stuff. Not to mention the expensive stuff like computers, cars and oil.

China is certainly on our radar here at ICMI. According to some numbers quoted by ICMI China's operations director Wang Houdong, China had 216,000 agents in 2005 with more than 10% market growth annually. [Read his article An Inside Look at China's Burgeoning Call Center Industry for more about China]

So what can we learn about call centers from a book about sushi? That's easy: it's that the call center market is global. That all of our concerns in North America are shared by agents in China, Australia, the U.K. and Singapore. And everywhere else.

We at ICMI and Call Center Magazine will be changing the way we cover this huge industry in the next couple months. We'll be unveiling a new look for our website and our magazine. And we'll be giving you much more global coverage.

Peter Leppik over at Vocal Laboratories, the customer service survey firm, had a blog post on survey questions that caught my eye recently.

He relates a story of the pseudonymously-named BigBank, which had the doomed idea to attempt lead generation via live second party post-call surveys.

The idea was that if a bank customer answered "yes" to the question "would you recommend your bank to a friend," the follow-up question was something to the effect of "okay, what's your friend's name and telephone number?" Bad idea. Any regular person can see how this might lead to trouble, but the trouble didn't come from the bank's customers.

"As soon as this question was added to the survey," Leppik writes, "BigBank's 'net promoter' score (the metric generated from the 'recommendation' question) plummeted." Now would could that be?

Leppik:

After some months of investigation, BigBank discovered that the interviewers found the follow-up question unbelievably awkward--and I don't blame them. So awkward, in fact, that they absolutely did not want to ask the question. But they had to ask the question, and if a customer answered 'yes' to the recommendation question, the interviewers would get in trouble if they didn't put something down for a new sales lead.

So when a customer said 'yes' to the recommendation question, the interviewer would simply enter 'no' in the form for the survey--intentionally miscoding the answer to avoid having to ask the awkward follow-up. Since the interviews weren't recorded, the odds of getting caught were small.

Leppik's right, of course, but the biggest lesson I extract from this example is that call recording (and by extension, data mining) of all kinds can save a center months in decyphering service problems. If your survey team asks a terrible question, you'll know early on. And this extends to all kinds of call center interactions; even small centers can afford to record every call now. They ought to.