After reading the New York Times' August 16th article titled "At Netflix, Victory for Voices Over Keystrokes," I have to express my appreciation to Netflix for its sensible approach to service.

Too often, those of us who work in call centers, and those of us who observe them, hear predictions that on-line communication will replace conversations between customers and the companies they do business with.

A far more nuanced analysis, which you can hear during our August 16th Webcast, reveals that it's much more helpful to think of on-line communication as an option in addition to, rather than as a substitute for, conversations.

Sometimes, as appears to be the case with customers of Netflix, consumers prefer live conversations to e-mail correspondence to such an extent that companies – like Netflix – make the decision to assist customers entirely by phone.

What combination of phone and on-line communication works best in your call center? I invite you to drop me a line to offer your thoughts and observations.

Ever wonder what the guy who does your job in the call center across the street is making?

This reader plea came our way last night. I must confess, I don't know the answer to his question, but I'd like to. Anyone in the call center blogosphere have any thoughts to share with him or us? This is a fascinating best-practice question.

I wasn't very good at math when I was a student. That's always been a great disappointment to me, because being able to intelligently manipulate numbers seems to be one of the great achievements of being human. So while I'm pretty clueless when it comes to the actual use of math, I can appreciate the rigor and beauty of new lines of mathematical analysis. Especially when I understand what's being analyzed, like call center performance.

The new thing I'm going to tell you about is called Multivariable Testing, or MVT. It's complicated - it's all mathy - but it's pretty elegant when you get outside it and see what it can do. Developed by a company called QualPro, it's a method of analyzing the consequences of making many changes at once to a situation.

The Call Center editorial team is going to be travelling to Orlando next week to participate in this year's Call Center Demo Conference. For my part, I'll be on an exciting panel called 60 Ideas in 60 Minutes with three other industry luminaries (Greg Levin, Jay Minucci and Gerry Barber).

Each of us will present 15 ideas for making the call center more effective - ideas that you can implement right away, sometimes without much cost. I've seen the ideas that the other three gentlemen are bringing: bring extra pens and paper cause there's so much knowledge gonna happen in that room you're gonna want to take good good notes. That panel is taking place next Tuesday (5/16) at 1:15 pm.

Here's one of my ideas that has particular relevance in a trade show context:

Idea #15: When talking to a vendor, ask them this: "What specific experience do you personally have in your past that makes me think I can trust you to understand my call center problems. Did you work in a call center?" You'll probably be surprised by the answers you get.

There's 59 more to come.

That's what consumers are telling call center operators in the UK, according to a recent survey.

British consumers rate the performance of call centers as "modest" at most. This was the finding of a spot satisfaction study of over 300 customers in Greater London conducted by market research firm Metric (UK) Ltd during December 2005. All respondents had used the call centre they rated during the week preceding the interview. Overall consumer satisfaction ranked as six on a ten point scale. Women and under-55s were the least satisfied with the performance of call centers.

The study further revealed that women's dissatisfaction was largely aimed at the call centre agents - with particular aspects having shortcomings cited as "agents are polite and friendly / not robots", "agents being concerned about the customer's issue", etc. Consumers aged 55+ were more dissatisfied with “agent being polite and friendly”, "feeling secure about personal information shared" and "need to wait due to computer problems".

The researchers add this interesting thought about the psychology of providing customer service:

"A collective look at the attributes on which women are significantly dissatisfied leads to a strong conjecture of a gender bias in operation on the part of male agents. When Metric quizzed about this to some Call Center experts they did not rule out the possibility but sighted another more generous to agent explanation. In their opinion when a woman calls it is a social plus business call for her. Unlike her male counterpart, she does not like to restrict herself to the business on hand only. She perhaps wants to share a few more things which the agents are neither trained nor allowed to indulge in. One interesting revelation from this study is the prime importance of the human component. The study indicated that the human component accounts for close to half of total satisfaction followed by system and technology issues which together with human component account for 64 % of the variation. Ironically what seems to be the highest customer priority is an area where call center performance is relatively weakest."

The company that did the survey is available here. There were some interesting methodological quirks to the research, which we're looking into; more to be posted here as we find out how the survey was conducted.

What's the best structure for a call center in an organization? Should it report into Marketing? Or Operations?

I've been thinking about this for some time, letting the question percolate in the back of my mind, and I still don't have a clear cut answer. You can make a good case for either model. But, I think I'm detecting a transition from ops to marketing - and this is borne out in conversations I have with vendors. For example, execs at Kana told me last week that increasingly when they make sales pitches for call center equipment and software, they are focusing their attention on the executive managerial level that makes strategy decisions.... So deployment of call center technology is more of a strategic decision than a reactive one.

Like I said, I don't have a fully formed mental picture of where this is all going, so I strongly invite input. What's the best model for fitting a call center into an organization? What should the reporting structure and lines of responsibility be like? Who should be in charge?

And how is the "should be" different from the "is"? Are the wrong people running your center?

Tell me, and tell the industry: kdawson@cmp.com.

Call it "The Great IVR Debate of '05." A Boston area business man has been making the news and talk show rounds, giving a reported 100+ interviews over the past month. Why? It's all because of a list he compiled of ways callers can bypass call center interactive voice response systems and connect directly to a live operator. We blogged it shortly after it started, and since then it's gotten much bigger. Here's a play-by-play of the action so far:

A semi-regular compendium of call centers that are opening, closing, and making the news around the world.

David Pogue's article in today's on-line edition of The New York Times presents – in an amusing way – ten commandments for how manufacturers of consumer electronics ought to serve customers.

You'll find that commandments six, seven and eight are particularly relevant to call centers.

A reader came to us this week with a fascinating question that we're not equipped to answer directly, so I throw it to the call center masses for discussion:

I am trying to determine what the line items are on the operating budget of a call center. I suspect that some of them are labor, training, systems, and facilities. Are there others on a line item? And, is it possible to tell me how much of a budget is allocated to each? Might you have a sample you can email to me?

Anyone have any suggestions? Email to kdawson@cmp.com

The role of a manager is a position of responsibility. But what exactly are call center managers responsible for?

Amit Shankardass of ClientLogic sent me some thoughts about macro trends affecting the call center industry. This was followup to a really interesting conversation we had about the impact of offshoring, how outsourcing is changing, and whether we're watching the birth of a global call center industry. (Rather than a collection of discrete national industries.)

Here's what he says he is seeing:

"

1. Revenue Orientation - The typical role of the call center agent in the US is rapidly changing. Now, more than ever, companies have an acute focus on increasing the revenue per customer. In order to do this, they have begun to look at existing interactions with their customers and ask the question "are we leaving revenue on the table during these interactions". To this end, ClientLogic has helped several of our clients execute up-sell, cross-sell, saves and retention programs on existing customer support AND even tech support desks. For example: At present 25% of our clients take advantage of our Sales and Saves programs - up from 15% at the start of 2004.

2. Six Sigma - While six sigma has been around in the manufacturing industry for a while, it is relatively new to the world of contact centers. More and more of our clients have begun to ask for, and obtain on their own, six sigma resources. We have seen these six sigma resources (at our clients) mostly using the analytics aspect of six sigma towards process improvement initiatives. Keep in mind that it is impossible to ensure a 99.9997% (the measure for six sigma) non-defect rate when it comes to human interactions. It is for this reason that analytics is the most widely used aspect of six sigma in contact centers.

Thanks, Amit!