43: This year marks the tenth anniversary of the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act. To highlight this important milestone, we would like to salute Portland, OR-based service bureau LiveBridge (formerly known as TeleMark), which has long made an effort to recruit and accommodate physically disabled agents. The founder of LiveBridge, Patrick Hanlin, earned a Pioneer Award from Call Center Magazine in 1999.

44: Telecom Developers Expo, which took place in 1991 in Dallas, was a defining moment in our industry's history. There were 67 exhibitors, a few thousand attendees, a bunch of 10'x 10' booths and lots of excitement. This show evolved into Computer Telephony Expo and began an 11-year tradition that continues in Los Angeles next year. Out of Telecom Developers Expo also grew last month's Internet Telecom Expo, as well as Call Center Demo and this month's CRM Demo.

45: This year also marks the 15th anniversary of the establishment of the Incoming Calls Management Institute (ICMI), an independent consulting and educational firm built on the mission of "serving the unique needs of incoming call center managers." Gordon MacPherson, the founder of the ICMI, and Brad Cleveland,the ICMI current president and CEO, are among this year's inductees into Call Center Magazine's Hall of Fame.

46: Call centers are receiving more attention than ever during a booming economy but did you know that it took a stock market crash on October 19, 1987 to bring call centers from the "back room" to the front page? "Callers Can't Get Through," wrote The Wall Street Journal, underscoring how important call centers had become to the fabric of society.

47: A more positive example of how call centers entered the mainstream is the 1988 story about the GE Answer Center in The New York Times Consumer's World magazine. The article, "Seeking Profits in Consumer Complaints," was indicative of a growing awareness of just how powerful call centers are for building customer loyalty.

48: "One day at a trade show a Secret Service agent showed great interest in a copy of Call Center magazine," says Madeline Bodin. "When I finally asked him what was so intriguing, he whipped out a ruler to measure some money that was depicted. Far from caring about the contents of the magazine, he was concerned that a particular ad violated anti-counterfeiting regulations!"

49: Training software really caught our attention this year, especially as more call monitoring companies have sought to incorporate evaluation and training modules within their suites of products. One of the most intriguing products we've seen - and which creates a new category of training software - is StarTrainer from Simtrex, a software firm based in Atlanta, GA, which enables trainees to receive simulated calls from their phones. What makes this new approach to CBT particularly groundbreaking is how it can integrate with your phone system to provide trainees with the most true-to-life call center experience possible.

50: DaimlerChrylser and GM began rolling out communication systems in cars, which offered customers satellite positioning services, onboard maintenance diagnostics and the means to reach appropriate support centers from anywhere at the touch of a button. These options for drivers illustrate how call centers can be instrumental in transforming virtually any organization, including manufacturers, into "new economy" companies.

51: Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams and Billy Crystal appeared on the cover of the January 1993 issue of Call Center Magazine, which ran a cover story about how the annual Comic Relief event raises funds by phone.

52: The winter holiday shopping season of 1999 proved to be a publicity disaster for dot-coms and it brought down stock prices for e-tailers. Orders shipped late or never arrived. There were glaring incompatibilities between retail outlets and Web sites. Customers got trapped within poorly designed tangles of services when trying to reach organizations to resolve problems. But from that point on, dot-coms recognized what brick-and-mortar companies had known all along: that live service from call centers was what kept customers coming back for the next holiday season.

53: Few call centers offer both training and outsourcing. Centralized Marketing Company (CMC; Cordova, TN) combines both. The firm's founder, Call Center Magazine Pioneer award winner Teresa Hartsaw, realized that training was necessary to ensure that agents and CMC's clients understood that teleservices could combine both productivity and quality. Through the training CMC provides, agents learn how to sell features and benefits in addition to handling calls. The firm also offers courses for supervisors and managers.

54: Though Butterball's Turkey-Talk hot line, staffed by trained home economists, mainly answers questions about how to prepare turkey, some of the questions can get pretty weird. Here are some examples:

• A truck driver wanted to know if his turkey would cook more quickly if he drove faster; he planned to roast his bird on the engine block of his 18-wheel truck.
  
• When one woman called to find out how long it would take to roast her turkey, the economist asked how much the bird weighed. The woman responded, "I don't know. It's still running around outside."
  
• A restaurant owner in California wanted to know how to roast a turkey for a vegetarian menu, while another West Coast compatriot, took turkey preparation to extremes by scrubbing her bird with bleach. She called Butterball to find out how to clean off the bleach, and to her dismay, was advised to dispose of the turkey.

55: Customer service should be quick and efficient, but it should also be zany, according to Archie McPhee. The Mukilteo, WA-based novelty company specializes in tongue-in-cheek marketing and customer service at the four-agent call center. Archie McPhee uses the same light-hearted prose in its catalogs and when responding to customers' e-mail messages. In fact, the same employees who write copy for the company's catalog also write Responses to customers' e-mail messages. Although the agents understand that dissatisfied customers are no laughing matter, they're also serious about remaining true to the spirit that customers associate with a company that proudly proclaims that "each plastic set of teeth and gums exhibits exceptional dental hygiene."

56: Telemarketing sometimes gets a bad rap, but imagine if agents continually had to dial numbers manually, only to find that most people they called weren't home? That's far less likely with predictive dialers, which are the best thing to happen to outbound campaigns since the term "telemarketing" was first created.

57: The 1960s brought us more than just the Beatles. In 1962, Plantronics introduced the first-ever lightweight headsets, which would come to represent the agents who wear them.