Devoted to the call center industry, the agents on the phones, and their managers

Even in call center management, suspicion can sometimes be good. If the alternative is complacency. Complacency in the face of competition can lead to defeat.

As we commemorate the launch of Sputnik, the first human satellite, fifty years ago, our first reaction might be, "What was the big deal? What was the United States afraid of? Why did the US need to spend billions of dollars to beat the Russians?"

As it turns out, and it's not something that Russian scientists have talked about until now, the rocket that fired Sputnik into space wasn't originally designed for launching satellites. It was designed for launching a hydrogen bomb. At the United States. If necessary.

American leaders didn't know everything, but they suspected anything. As a result, the United States launched a massive effort to improve its scientific abilities, drawing more young people (well, young men, at the time) to study science and technology. It paid off. A generation of technical know-how resulted from Sputnik. Enthusiasm for science has since dwindled in the United States, which is why American graduate schools are no longer full of Americans.

The call center industry has experienced some industry-changing events too, though we may not have understood it at the time, anymore than the US understood Sputnik. 

One industry-changing event for call centers was the development of VOIP (voice over IP). In 1996, Worldcom's chief operating officer John Sidgmore said that in a few years, the company would no longer need long distance switches. Of course, his boss Bernie Ebbers hardly understand the Internet, and in 1996 there were no real VOIP services for consumers and small businesses. Worldcom eventually went bankrupt, partly because of competition with VOIP services. Today, VOIP makes it possible to set up distributed PBXs and home-based call center agents, with phone features that only the most expensive systems could accomodate in 1996.

Worldcom tried to make the switch to VOIP, and was doing it before their purchase by Verizon. Yet even years later, I heard Worldcom switch error recordings on my phone. At least the Houston DMS switch was still in use, despite what John Sidgmore hoped.

When faced with a new technology, or a new competitor, eternal vigilance is the price of victory.