[mattchew]

> I'm hard pressed to name a single business in which consumers have been well served by call centers.

Most of the time that I get on the phone to a big corporation I end up talking to someone in a call center.

There are certainly exceptions (phone company!), but I usually get adequate service. It's fairly common to get very agreeable, friendly, competent service.

We had a dial-a-nurse line in a town I used to live in. We used it several times, it was a very nice resource, and when we moved I missed having it. (That was about 10 years ago--I believe it is shut down now, FWIW.)

[tptacek]

I get unbelievably bad phone service from:

* The phone company (for instance, my DSL goes down for 2 days because three tiers of tech support can't reset a DSLAM port without doing a truck roll first)

* My bank (for instance, it takes 1.5 hours in a grocery store parking lot to clear a bogus fraud alert on my debit card)

* My mortgage (for instance, it takes 3 30+ minute calls to successfully confirm receipt of a screwed up mortgage paymetn)

* FedEx (for instance, FedEx can't explain the difference between Freight and Standard shipping, doesn't know that they can't schedule a Freight pickup, and delays a shipment for a day)

* Airlines (for instance, it takes 30+ minutes to confirm that no support tier at Air Canada can fix screwed up seat assignments that take 4 minutes for a gate agent to fix afterwards)

* Taxi dispatches (for instance, I book a car a couple hours in advance, call multiple times to confirm, and find out 15 minutes after my deadline that no order was ever taken)

I'm being serious: I can't come up with an example where phone support involved a call center for me where I've had a good --- or even acceptable --- experience. Call centers are uniformly terrible. I'm convinced this is so because call centers have no incentive to be effective. They are pure cost centers, necessary evils for their owners. That's why so many of them get outsourced, further attenuating any accountability for their work.

[mattchew]

Your experience is different than mine. I usually have an acceptable-to-good experience when I call a credit card company, which happens often enough. I have always gotten excellent phone service from my car insurance company (Progressive). YMMV I suppose.

A medical call center like the one described in the article doesn't need to be a cost center. I could easily see them being run as standalone companies.

[tptacek]

You're right. I've gotten good results from Progressive. That's my one example.

The issue isn't so much that it's impossible to run a quality call center. It clearly isn't. The issue is that call center economics are rigged to favor operations that poorly serve customers.