Fast Company's blog is pretty good reading. Check out this post from February 27 about their editor's Times piece. It links to a subscriber only article from the Wall Street Journal on a similar subject.

It also links to the old article Ted Hopton mentioned. 'But Wait, You Promised …' may be from 2001 (gasp! How old!), but it's nice and long, and it has some good insight. Writer Charles Fishman visits a Sprint PCS call center in Fort Worth, Texas, and finds that while customers are on hold with agents, those agents are on hold with specific department agents, who have to contact still more departments. Is a Lubbock, Texas customer trying to defraud Sprint, or did his phone get cloned? The plot thickens!

There's a quote from Patricia Seybold, a consultant and author of the then new book The Customer Revolution: How to Thrive When Customers Are in Control: "I agree that customer service hasn't gotten better since the Internet came along. It has gotten worse. But companies are beginning to realize that we're very angry at them. Companies that don't wake up and pay attention to this are going to be out of business." Interesting to think those words were spoken in 2001. How far have we actually come? If I had said those words were uttered this week, would you have believed me?

The Fast Company blog also links to an article called "Please Stay on the Line" from October of 2002. The article starts with this:

"We call them looking to get some information, some service, a little help. Instead, we get hold music, and much worse -- push-button hell, call-transfer purgatory, or simply a click . . . disconnected. And yet call centers are one of the country's fastest-growing industries: 3% of Americans now work for a call center, and Gartner Research predicts that the industry could nearly double in size by 2010. That could mean twice as many people to help you. Or twice as many opportunities to press 7 and pray that someone, someone vaguely competent even, will pick up."

Again, interesting to hear old predictions. And familiar negativity. This article describes a call center management conference in a Chicago convention center the author calls "… a Death Star of windowless meeting rooms on a wide stretch of Lake Michigan shoreline."

Issues discussed at the 2002 conference include absenteeism, turnover, and offshoring. Not much changed, has it?