Just as I'm working on distilling information from an Accenture report on government call centers and how they've still got a bit of room to improve, I run across this angry letter in the Washington Post from a woman trying to get a passport renewed:

I was so incensed by the July 9 letter from Maura Harty, assistant U.S. secretary of state for consular affairs, that I can hardly believe I haven't spontaneously combusted.

My son applied for a passport on May 31 for a July 8 departure, paying the expediting fee. When I went to the Web site that Ms. Harty directed readers to in her letter, I was told "the passport is in process" and nothing else. Calling the passport call center was equally unsatisfying. The agents at the center can do two things: (1) tell you they don't know anything and can't help you because they aren't allowed to talk with passport issuers; and (2) put up to two whole notes in your file asking the squirreled-away processors to expedite the process (which we had already paid for).

What happens next? If someone in the issuance section actually reads the notes, this person may or may not respond and let the call center people know what is going on. For this reason I was asked to call the call center back two days later. When I did, I waited 35 minutes for someone to tell me that they didn't know anything.

To add insult to injury, if you are able to wait the 40-plus minutes it takes to access the call center's "automated" appointment maker, you then get the pleasure of standing outside in the blazing sun for hours between the time of your appointment and the time someone actually can see you. You are not told that you are to be outside, in the blazing sun, with no shade, and thus none of the more than 50 people in line had hats, water or sunscreen. Did they have someone outside providing information to the people waiting? Absolutely not.

If you need a passport, don't call the State Department's ridiculous number or visit its inane Web site. Call your senator or your representative.

One of the key findings in the Accenture report is that merely having the technology to do things (like IVRs, web sites, call routing) doesn't mean that the cultural change has been made in the call center to really give citizens access to their government and the services it provides.

For examples of how a government call can go right, look to New York's 311 line, or the new 311 service for the City of Minneapolis, which we profiled here.

Does anyone out there in call center land have any policies about not talking to callers who call from cell phones while driving?

My aunt asked me recently if I knew of any call centers with such policies; I do not. She works in a center run by a non-profit organization that does lengthy interviews with people, many of whom are busy and need to use commuting time for the interviews. Her center is working on a policy wherein agents ask the interviewee if they are calling from a cell phone while driving and politely ask them to reschedule if they are.

What do you think about this?

When we see a call center angle in the mainstream media, we dive on it. It's a dubious one here, granted, but we'll tell you about it just the same.

For those of you who don't watch American Idol, Sanjaya Malakar is a mediocre singer of mixed Indian and Italian ancestry who has a large following, probably based on his flamboyance.

A rumor circulated that his reality show success was actually based upon Indian call center agent support, a rumor that the Associated Press deemed scandalous enough to debunk:

As for the theory that Indian call center operators are phoning in votes for Malakar: Most workers have calls automatically dialed for them by computers. They couldn't even call next door if they wanted to.

As I mined the ICMI QueueTips page for wisdom about staffing and hiring practices for our February Staffing & Recruiting feature, I was amazed at how many posts there were about what to call agents.

And many call center professionals obliged with lengthy lists of euphemisms for one word: agent. That's what we call them here at Call Center Magazine -- it's just easier. Occasionally we'll use the term CSR or customer service representative. But consumer care specialist? customer support coordinator? Why look for synonyms?

The Cogitating Call Center Manager at the blog Call Center Steel Cage Death Match may be giving up the call center blogging business with the imminent closure of his center.

What we like about the Cogitating Call Center Manager (we'll call him CCCM) was that he didn't just blog about call center office politics, which we admit can be all-consuming; he opined about bigger issues, like Paul English and the Get Human affair:

As much as I rail against a lot of call center "stuff", like scripts, and "retention" etc., I just can't get behind this Gethuman. It seems, on one hand, to be all about his hatred for IVRs, but then he includes a place to rate your customer service experience with any company you choose to. So is it poor customer service from phone agents that he has issue with, just IVRs, or both? I can't really tell, because the sweeping phrases like "consumer movement", "change the face of customer service", and "volunteers who demand high quality customer service" all sound like he has an issue the whole shebang.

If this reads like a eulogy, it's because we've seen so many bright, articulate call center bloggers stop blogging in the last year. The Anonymous Cog was another blogger that stopped blogging. We eulogized his blog in September.

We'll be sorry to see the Cogitating Manager go if he does in fact move on. Any other agents or managers out there want to start blogging about call centers?

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.

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...
  

Here's something I found out the other day: more people are employed in call centers in the US than in the entire agricultural industry.

Stop and think about that. Just a century ago we were still largely a nation of farmers. Now we're a nation of service people.

I was thinking about this because agribusiness is a huge colossus that bestrides the nation and its policy-making apparatus. Think about Iowans and the ethanol fetish they bring out in politicians every four years; think about agricultural price supports and how much of the federal budget they consume. Think about simple things like the food pyramid and the conniptions the FDA goes through every time they want to revise it because of the power of the farming lobby. Agriculture is everywhere, it's practically in the DNA of America. Except that no one works on farms anymore.

I've always assumed that about 4% of the American workforce is employed in call centers, and I ballparked that 2% worked on farms. I never put them together before (or thought to check the accuracy). So I went to the website of the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics and there, lo and behold, I was right. They count almost 3 million call center reps and less than half a million agriworkers.

There are more call center reps than there are accountants in America.

There are more call center reps than there are lawyers.

Agribusiness is so powerful because it's not fragmented; it's run by a small number of very large companies that carefully groom their image through collective action in the form of lobbying and public relations. The call center industry, by contrast, does nothing of the kind. It is an army of trained professionals that functions largely without leadership or collective guidance. Imagine what it would be like if we had a lobbying group to call our own, even a trade association. We might even be able to get the government to build tariffs to keep foreign call centers from handling our calls offshore. Oh wait, we don't want that. Sorry - just channelling Lou Dobbs there for a minute.

It ain't quite over yet. After Vincent Ferrari's much-publicized call to AOL, a frustratingly long but ultimately successful attempt to cancel his online service, the beleaguered online service is trying to pick up the pieces.

"By my count, he used the word 'cancel' 21 times. That's not counting the I-don't-need-it's, I-don't-want-it's and I-don't-use-it's. Add the other inferences, it's probably closer to 30," said AOL spokesman Nicholas J. Graham, quoted in the New York Times last week. He was talking about how many times Ferrari tried to make it clear that he wanted his service canceled.

What ever happened to Paul English, anyway? The blogger who started an anti-IVR media frenzy has been quiet for a while as the public's interest in his cause wanes. I checked his website, Gethuman.com and found little new content.

But his personal site, the blog where it all started, had a small gem: English writes, "If you are a sales person and you want to cold call me at my company, here are some tips." They're good ones, too. All of them are common sense, but sometimes sales people need to be reminded about how to approach potential clients. English's rule number one: "Concise email. Just send me a brief email telling me what you offer and how it will help me." Read all of his tips here.

Vincent Ferrari, the guy who recorded his account cancellation call to AOL, has been making the talk show rounds. Is Ferrari the next Paul English? Click here to watch his five minute interview with Matt Lauer on the NBC Today Show.

Click here for our blog on the original story and here more AOL horror stories.

There's a ten-seat call center in midtown Manhattan where the agents answer a mere 150 calls a day. They'll tell you the technical term for the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of one's mouth, but they won't help you with your crossword puzzle.

These are the reference librarians at the New York Public Library. Their call center, if you can call it that -- they call it the "telephone reference service" -- is across the street from the main library, the one with the famous lions out front. The library's center was profiled by the New York Times yesterday.

Donna Fluss, a consultant and author who writes for Call Center, has just issued an intriguing new white paper on a technique for automated "real-time coaching":

What it is:

"Real-time coaching is an emerging application that literally listens to agents as they handle customer calls and notifies them via screen pop-ups when they make a mistake or miss a step. These applications use speech recognition technology to monitor how agents handle their calls. Real-time coaching is very effective because it enables agents to take corrective action while the customer is still on the line and generally before the customer knows there is a problem."

I think she does a good job in the white paper explaining what the hard and soft ROI factors are, and she includes some pretty useful best practices.

You can read the white paper on her site.

The Consumerist blog continues its "Time to a Human" series with banks. Consumerist lackies have been phoning the call centers of 19 banks for the last four days, recording the hold times. Every time they do these surveys, the most notable thing is the one or two companies that have real trouble getting to the phones. Everyone else is clustered around 0-3 minutes of hold time per call.

So what do these surveys measure? Not much. We could try to tell you that Citibank must have a really overworked call center because they kept the Consumerist folks on hold for four minutes, but that's probably not true. The bar graph makes Citibank and US Bank look pretty bad, but the fact is, any wait under five minutes in barely noticeable.

In fact, look at day three: all wait times were under one minute, fifty five seconds. So the fact that MBNA had the longest time is meaningless.

On day two, Fidelity was last, with a mind-numbing three minute and twenty one second wait. And yet they gave the shortest wait on day four!

[We also blogged their previous surveys on airlines and mobile phone companies]

VocaLabs' SectorPulse reports on the mobile phone and financial industries, the latest of which are out now, are done using VocaLabs stable of panelists, who report quarterly on their personal experiences with their phone companies and banks.

Once again, Washington Mutual wallops the other institutions in customer satisfaction. And Citibank looks like it's been on a gentle slope to a zero customer satisfaction score from December to March. They actually appear to hit zero at the end of the quarter. What happened?

Call completion is a factor. VocaLabs' Peter Leppik said in a press release: "The continuing poor grades for Call Completion remain troubling in this industry. Repeat calls to complete a single piece of business frustrates customers and negatively impacts the financial performance of a customer service operation. Across all the financial services companies for which we have data, about one customer in three must call more than once, an unnecessary burden on both the customer and the company."

For the mobile phone industry survey, Verizon and T-Mobile are both doing very well in customer satisfaction. Per usual, Sprint PCS is doing terribly. Cingular struggles -- mostly successfully -- to overcome the poor ratings it inherited from joining AT&T.

[We blogged on the last SectorPulse report here.]

In Part One of our two part series, we compiled our best articles on headsets for call centers. This installment will focus on facilities design -- a fundamental issue we don't often cover.

Continuing with its "Time to a Human" series, the Consumerist blog surveys airline call centers. Today, day four of the week-long survey finds Midwest at the bottom again. The Consumerist says the airline's fifteen minute wait is actually an improvement. Compare that to every other airline where between one and two minutes was the norm and seven minutes (United and Alaska) was long.

On day three Alaska was second to last with about a five minute hold-time, and Midwest kept them waiting nearly 22 minutes.

Day two was much like the others, except this time United was second to worst. Midwest clocked in at 19 minutes.

Day one: Midwest, 15 minutes; Alaska, 9 minutes. Rumor has it, Midwest serves fresh-baked cookies on board. Have they got their priorities straight? Maybe!

The other airlines surveyed were Southwest, Jet Blue, Continental, American, US Airways, Northwest, Air Canada, Delta, Airtran, Spirit Air, and Lufthansa. Their times are barely worth talking about because they were all clustered between 30 seconds and two minutes. Only the deviations and extremes are interesting.

We talked about Consumerist's mobile phone co. call center "Time to a Human" survey in an earlier blog -- it turns out Nextel won that battle. Here are the results.

And yes, Consumerist callers did use Gethuman.com to bypass the IVRs.

Last December I wrote about blogger Seth Godin's wacky idea for call centers to reward customers for calling during busy times. The IVR would capture the caller's information, and an agent would call back when they could. But the caller would also get $20 for the trouble. Godin talks about the potential for "dramatically increasing customer joy."

I thought it was a stupid idea then, and I still do. Here's why: I just called the travel call center for our company. I had to make arrangements to get to our Call Center Demo & Conference in Orlando in May. All operators were busy, but within 20 seconds, a woman came on the line and took my name and number so they could call me back when they weren't busy. What I'm saying is that Godin's idea is being used, but without the silly $20.

They called me back in about an hour. Why would I need any money for that? I was on hold for all of 20 seconds. The reward was avoiding the queue. Why don't more call centers do this? If you know, tell me.

Someone in my family works for a call center run by a non-profit foundation. The agents in her center interview senior citizens -- people who are often hard of hearing. The center is moving to a new location and the agents are concerned that the new space, which is rumored to have an "open, ecological design," will make those interviews difficult. If the agents can't have their own offices to conduct phone interviews, how can they make sure that they don't disrupt each other with all the shouting they have to do to be heard by the seniors they're talking to? I thought I'd let our readers take a stab at it, and then post some of Call Center's articles on the subject.

Does anyone out there have any advice about headsets for a loud, small call center? Tell us how you like your headsets.

Here's some of what Call Center Magazine has said about headsets:

We got a big response to our Taylorism and the Modern Call Center blog entry. We asked whether or not readers thought using scripts in call centers were helpful for creating efficiency and consistency. Every reader who e-mailed us thought scripts were detrimental. Here's a sampling:

Todd Beck, Senior Product Manager for AchieveGlobal wrote:

"One of my favorite "scripts" stories comes from a company whose new senior executive stopped by to listen to a few calls. An irate customer screamed at the agent that, "Every time I call you guys, you make the problem worse." As coached (and rewarded), the agent carefully followed the script by reading the next prescribed phrase: "I can help you with that." Fortunately for AchieveGlobal, the executive immediately threw out the scripts, fired his training vendor, and called us the next day to train his reps on a more attentive style of service.

Scripts are like krypton to any stellar service initiative. By preventing the service provider from responding to the unique combination of each customer, each call, and each service provider’s own personality, scripts ensure mediocrity. Perhaps worst of all, scripts eliminate the service provider’s personal accountability. We know call center reps are smarter than that. Why constrain them to the lowest-common denominator?"

Reader Linda Goff wrote:

"After years in the call center industry, I would have to agree that scripting dumbs down not only the rep, but the caller. Feedback from callers in the last three centers I worked for was negative....It's hard to tell which customers dislike more - the scripting or the voice recognition."

And finally, solutions consultant Johnny Roland told us:

"Interesting conversation. If the key metric for call centers is solving the customer's problem on the first call, then listening, troubleshooting, and orchestrating a response are the primary skills needed. The scripted call is usually a thinly veiled attempt to sell something to the customer -- a tactic most consumers see through right away. It is an artificial way to try to create a "relationship" between two people who don't know each other. The customer dials a number and gets an "advisor" on the phone who is looking at a CTI screen pop that paints a picture of "who" this customer is. Always an incomplete picture. And it's a relationship that will only last a few minutes."

The Pennsylvania engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote in 1911 that the typical iron worker was as dumb as an ox, and that people who had repetitive jobs worked at the slowest rate they could get away with. Taylor came up with a system for tasks to be broken down to simple parts that didn't require any thought. Thought would be left to the supervisors. This is what is now known as Taylorism.

In an article a few years ago, Adria Scharf, co-editor of Dollars & Sense compared today's scripts -- 'thank you for calling ___, how may I help you?' and others found in a call center -- to yesterday's Taylorism: "Scripted talk is more than just an annoying quirk of the modern service economy. It represents a deep form of managerial control -- a regimentation of the labor process so total that it extends even to speech. Scripts are a fact of life for retail and service workers whose employers make use of a time-worn early-20th century managerial strategy: Taylorism."

But aren't scripts necessary to keep agents and other workers efficient and consistent? Or are they really a modern-day Taylorism, a system that assumes workers are dim-witted and lazy?

In January, we reported that Lloyds TSB, the UK bank, found that scripts annoyed customers who called its information line. Nine out of ten callers didn't like scripts. Further, 60% of callers didn't feel like their questions were answered and 55% said they weren't being listened to when scripts were used.

Scharf says the scripted call (and even the recorded/monitored call) is often bad for morale. The Communications Workers of America union says that monitoring should only be used for targeting training, never for punishment.

Studies by Cornell economist Rosemary Batt showed that when call centers used self-managed teams, they performed better than groups with rigid oversight. What do you think? Tell us.

I found two recent news articles on the homesourcing trend. One, from a Pennsylvania paper called the Times Leader follows a rural Minnesota woman who was tired of commuting 40 miles to work.

(it contains a gross geographical error -- she couldn't have commuted 40 miles to Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is at least 400, not 40 miles from any given point in Minnesota. The article meant Grand Rapids, Minnesota, birthplace of Judy Garland.)

So 25 year old Kathleen Hughes got a job as an agent in a virtual call center, becoming "part of a growing legion of so-called cyberagents, the ranks of which are expected to grow at a clip of more than 20 percent annually as companies continue to move work away from traditional brick-and-mortar call centers to lower-cost centers that tap into workers’ homes."

The article quoted statistics from IDC, a research and consulting firm: America's 112,000 home-based agents will triple in numbers by 2010.

In some ways, this trend isn't so good for the worker. The agent seldom gets benefits. Some employers insist agents train off the clock and some charge for training. Agents are often independent contractors, meaning they must have their own computer, phone line, and internet service.

The other article comes from the Salt Lake Tribune. It profiles a company called O'Currance Teleservices, a Salt Lake City outsourcer.

David Meine, an EVP at O'Currance, said that productivity seemed to go up 15% when agents worked from home. Agents must work at O'Currance's call centers for a few months before they can work from home.

Do you have any opinions about homesourcing? Do you work from home? Do you supervise or train home-based agents? Tell us about it.

National Public Radio had a nice five minute segment on call centers during its Morning Edition show late February called Call Center Outsourcing Slows (click the link to hear the story).

The show's host introduced the story: "Over the past few years some US companies have been closing their domestic call centers and relocating them to low wage countries like India. Researchers say many more companies are resisting that trend. Despite huge savings these companies say some call center jobs are ill-suited to overseas workers. Many companies have found an alternative to outsourcing: hiring workers who answer calls from their homes."

NPR's Jim Zarroli spoke to AAA EVP David Hughes, who told him that the company has never considered outsourcing calls overseas -- roadside assistance calls are too sensitive for someone who isn't familiar with American roads and driving problems.

He also spoke to Rosemary Batt, an associate professor of Human Resource Studies at Cornell University. She surveyed nearly 500 call centers, and says that there are still about four million call center jobs in America and only a "steady trickle" are being created in other countries (about 400,000 in India).

Batt said that it was the simple transactions that got outsourced the most. Credit card activation or telemarketing.

And then the topic turned to "homesourcing." Zarroli visited Jim Miller in the agent's office -- his bedroom in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Our Joe Fleischer hosted a webcast yesterday called "Making At Home Agents Work." You can access the archived version of the one-hour seminar with Oracle/Siebel about homesourcing here.

.

The Call Center Steel Cage Death Match blog has a great post on falling asleep on the job, inspired by some news from Australia about a police emergency call center agent nodding off. Apparently the supervisor had been up late drinking the night before. He dozed off on a La-Z-Boy.

The Cogitating Manager also mentions a Maryland 911 center agent whose snores can be heard on the recording of the call during which she fell asleep. The post, "Good Night Cube", is a long one with more sleeping-on-the-job stories.

There's a new blog that started just days ago -- Lonesome_Manager's Support Center Arcanum has posted a handful of short observations.

The Anonymous Cog's February 2 post (scroll down) tells a nice tale of a rude caller apologizing.

James Richards' Work Related Blogs and News has a post lining to a strange article from The Scotsman about February 6 being "National Sickie Day." A survey of 4,000 Scottish workers showed that Monday the 6th is "the date when more workers phone or text their boss with a fake illness than on any day of the year."

The world needs more call center blogs. Do you know of any? Have you thought of writing your own? Let us know.

The once flourishing call center blogosphere is on the wane -- at least by my measure. Here is a list of all the active call center blogs (by agents or managers) that I know of:

• Steel Cage Death Match
  
• Call Centre Diary
  
• Call Center Purgatory
  
• Call Center Blurbs

And here is a list of the dead and dying:

• The Supervisor of Hell (last active in December)
  
• Idiot Savant (active last in November)
  
• Your Call is Very Important to Us (active last in November)
  
• Call Center Redemption (last active in November)
  
• My Worst Call of the Day (active last in October)
  
• Usability Guide (active last in October)
  
• Call Center QA Blues (active last in October)
  
• Get Off My Case (quit the call center to work in a record store)
  
• Phone Rant (active in January, but may have quit the call center)
  
• Pop Dizzy (quit the call center)

What happened to all the blogs? Part of it is the temporary and transitional nature of call center jobs, particularly for agents (as opposed to managers). Another reason, which becomes obvious when you look at the final posts of the old blogs, is the stress of call center work.

Some of these dead blogs are still worth reading. They may never be resurrected but the old stories are there.

Work Related Blogs and News is a blog run by James Richards, a Scottish university lecturer who studies work and work blogs. He has a nice list of blogs by call center workers, police officers, teachers, cab drivers, nurses, and at least one of each from a priest, a lawyer, and a funeral director. Some of them are based in the UK, others America, Canada, Philippines, Japan, etc. Work Related Blogs is updated often and it occasionally includes a tidbit about call centers.

Every so often it's good to 'take the pulse' of the call center industry by looking at the blogs. From my unscientific random sampling, I'd say there's a mild disturbance in the force. People are restless. Agents are getting world-weary.

A week or so ago, we reported that Lloyds TSB, a UK bank, will stop using scripts in their call centers. Apparently callers don't like that "polished" tone in their agents.

We found a script of a different kind on a Dutch website recently: the EGBG anti-telemarketing Counterscript. As far as I can tell it was created by a guy named Martijn Engelbregt.

In May 2004, the BBC aired a program called Brassed Off Britain, which talked about "the UK's top ten consumer gripes." I happened upon the website for this program while looking for an article on a UK bank that decided to stop using scripts for its agents. Agents who stick to scripts, of course, are one of the things that "brass off" Brits about call centres. I mean centers.

More in the never-ending media blitz from the scourge of interactive voice response systems, Paul English. He appeared on NBC Nightly News last night, interviewed by correspondent Bob Faw. (The tone was exactly the same as every other Paul English consumer crusader story, except for one thing -- a folksy interview with Leon Ferber, a man who NBC claims invented IVRs. Who is Ferber? He's not on the internet anywhere, and NBC doesn't credit him with a company or a specific device)

You've seen our CC tv show, right? It's right on the front of the home page at www.callcentermagazine.

Steve Coscia responded to my commentary about how to value agents with some interesting thoughts of his own:

As an ex-call center manager I was lucky to get 2 - 3 years out of my best agents. One of two of my best agents stayed on for 10+ years. The best agents make a name for themselves within the company and within the industry and eventually job opportunities arise. During my 20 years of call center management, this reality resulted in me developing very structured orientation and training programs to get new hires up and running quickly. Overall, I found that being on a winning team and the fun factor were the big reasons for why people stayed on. Many of my old agents have moved on to become VPs and entrepreneurs and I am very proud of them now as I was then.

Steve writes often about agent-related issues, and you can read more of his insights at www.telestress.com.

Blogger Seth Godin is, according to his website, a bestselling author, entrepreneur and "agent of change." I'm not sure what an "agent of change" is, but it sounds dangerous. Godin has written a handful of business books, like All Marketers Are Liars.

In one of Mr. Godin's recent blog posts, he proposes call centers "reward" customers for calling when all agents are busy. His idea is for an IVR to take down the caller's information and have an agent call them back when they can. For the trouble, the customer will get $20.

As a writer and managing editor of a magazine that specializes in call centers, agents, managers, new software, technologies, so on, I am somewhat familiar with the tenets of customer satisfaction and I do know that it is important to be polite, remain cool and to have a soothing tone. Furthermore, I know that it is the customer's option to trust a representative with their personal information. These times can be unsure and in our day and age of people stealing your identification and credit card information, well, I don't have to tell you how suspicious you should be. Today I had an encounter that went a little over the top, in terms of a trying my own skills in well-executed customer sat and safeguarding personal information. I'd like to share it with you.

Three hearing-loss items, one from Ireland and two from the UK came up in my daily search for call center (or centre, as the case may be) news. My first thought is of the people I see on the subway everyday with headphones cranked up loud enough that I can hear lyrics over the noise of the train. How bad could things be for call center agents' ears? Pretty bad, but mostly in Britain and Ireland.

I was delighted to see two perspectives on call center rudeness this week, one from callers and one from agents. On the caller side, we have Lynne Truss and her new book. On the agent side, we have a study from the University of Pennsylvania.

2006 looks to be a year of confluence between the tactical application of technology and its strategic impact in customer service. A great illustration of this is the notion of agent development, and an important, emerging component of it: the agent experience.

Some aspects of agent development refer to long-term – but nonetheless critical – goals, like helping agents recognize what careers they can build within your company. Other aspects of agent development are more tactical, but they are still essential for ensuring agents do the most basic part of their jobs, like using software that displays details about customers with whom they communicate.

By speeding up how quickly agents learn to work with desktop applications, call centers can devote a larger percentage of time to training agents on the specific products and services their overall organizations offer.

Strategic considerations, like agents' career paths, intertwine with tactical considerations, like agents' knowledge of the tools they regularly use. That's why we refer to the agent desktop and agents' headsets within the general category of the agent experience.

Just as the concept of agent development has a practical aim, which is to help call centers recognize ways to combat turnover among agents, the aim of introducing the notion of the agent experience is practical as well: to ensure agents master the technical part of communication so that they can then focus on the continual improvement of the service they provide.

Stay tuned to this Web site for more on the agent experience.

A sad but interesting story reported first by the AP, available on CNN. Workers at the call centers set up by FEMA in the wake of the hurricanes are experiencing an unprecedented level of stress, anxiety and depression as a result of their workload and the kinds of calls they are getting:

The hopelessness lingers for Simmons, 57, and her co-workers at the Federal Emergency Management Agency center long after the callers hang up.

The already stressful job has became even more grueling in recent months as hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma smashed into the country in an eight-week span. As many as 73,000 calls could come in on any given day at the four call centers FEMA has set up.

The call centers usually work round-the-clock shifts during disasters, helping to temporarily house people and assist with aid applications. But those crisis hours are normally short-lived, as victims return to their homes to patch up damaged property and lives, said applicant services manager Phyllis Paton.

This time there's been no let up. Katrina hit on August 29, displacing an estimated 1.5 million and causing more than $34 billion in damage. As call center operators struggled to assist those evacuees, Hurricane Rita roared ashore on September 24 -- sparking an exodus of approximately 3 million more people.

It's an example of how important - and maybe how overlooked - call center agents are. They are the connective tissue not just between company and customer, but between any individual at risk and the institutions that can help. They put a face - or at least a voice - on a faceless bureaucracy.

Jacada is getting set to launch the latest iteration of its agent desktop productivity software next week at the ACCE conference in Seattle. They brought it to Call Center for an advance look.