In our current print issue, we've got a fascinating feature on call routing, IP-style. We've printed what we thought was the best excerpts from our interviews with industry experts. But online you can read all the material that we left out - it gives a very different picture when you can compare how different people (and companies) answer the same questions.

Today we posted the first in the series of interviews; they'll all be up by the end of the week. Here's the rollout:

Monday - Amcat
Tuesday - Cisco
Wednesday - NICE Systems and Nuasis
Thursday - PAETEC and Spanlink
Friday - Witness Systems

Enjoy them all!

I was on the phone with the US Postal Service last week -- or their call center's automated system anyway. I wanted to find out if there was a way to track a lost package without a tracking number, but that wasn't an option in the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. I wondered how to simply connect to an operator. I had to hang up and start over at one point. I found an operator on my second try, but it took a lengthy series of "no" responses to the available options. There had to be a better way.

Someone has done a great service for a lot of people, including a lot of call centers that now have to redesign their IVR scripts.

Found online: a website that lists the consumer phone numbers of major companies (70 so far) and instructions for how to bail out of their IVR systems to reach a real human. I think it's a service of Intuit (!), though why they're doing it is beyond me. Anyway, grab it before it's taken down.

It's a great resource, but remember: You don't want to be on this list. If you are, it means you're hard to deal with, people don't find your automated services particularly friendly. Lists like this are only the beginning: it's a heads up to a potential failure point in your call center that you might not even know about yet.