I know it's early, but in the spirit of preparing for the fall, I'd like to share my perspective about what I will focus on in an upcoming piece about call center offshoring; the piece will appear in the October issue of Customer Management Insight.

Here are some of the questions to which I will seek answers that reflect various points of view:

1. How accurate are wages as indicators of labor costs for prospective offshore call center locations? To phrase this question in another way, what other factors, in addition to wages, should companies consider as they evaluate potential costs and benefits of offshoring?

2. What factors are most likely to influence the quality of customer service that is typically available from leading offshore call center locations? To what extent, if any, could the quality of service that is typically available from a given region justify labor costs associated with that region?

3. What role do attrition and labor scalability in a given region play in encouraging businesses to look into locations they might have otherwise not thought to consider? What are recent examples of lesser-known offshore call enter locations that are benefiting from labor saturation in better-known regions?

4. Given that an increasing percentage of American consumers speak Spanish, to what extent do you expect call center operations that are based offshore will tap Spanish-speaking labor forces to serve American customers who speak Spanish?

5. What other trends in call center offshoring should companies be aware of?

Stay tuned for further thoughts about call center offshoring.