Desperately seeking one, single, solitary relationship.

• Author: Hall, Robert
• Position: Marketing Solutions

Dimension Data surveyed 300 call centers in 36 countries across five continents ... From 1997 to 2007 key performance metrics indicated a significant deterioration of quality service in contact centers. Call abandon rates ... increased nearly 127 percent ... annual agent attrition rate rose by 93 percent.

--Kevin Zimmerman, 1 to 1 Weekly, June 30, 2008

Some say fish were the last to discover the existence of water. I suspect call centers have become such a way of life for us that we have lost track of what life was like before then]. Over the age of 40, it is hard to recall what life was like without them. Under 30, it is the only world you know. For many businesses, the call center is the dominant means of interacting with their customers. Selling, scheduling installation, dealing with customer service issues--the call center has become a heavily utilized channel.

Yet the research and our own experiences confirm that despite its convenience and access, the call center is a troubled channel. Customers find a lot they don't like about transacting there, employees find a lot they don't like about working there, and companies find it a pretty leaky vessel.

Last week, I was working with a young, recently homeless, single mother of three kids under the age of eight, helping her find a job. She had worked in a couple of call centers, and since she had only a high school degree, the call center seemed to be her best hope for employment. Though she was desperate for a job, she was clearly reluctant to return to a call center. She said it was like working in a club. It is hard to build customer relationships, loyalty and recurring revenue on a model that most resembles a singles bar

To her, call center work was a steady diet of one-time interactions with customers--strangers really--surrounded by short-term co-workers mostly looking to leave. It hit me: A single mom, with no adult relationship at home and no extended family close by, goes to work in a relationally impoverished environment. She spends her day talking to and supposedly caring for people she will never meet, many of whom are upset.

The idea of having a group of people whose only job it is to deal with service problems and complaints of strangers all day is, anthropologically speaking, a novel arrangement. Historically the world of commerce has mixed that chore in with more rewarding customer interactions involving people we know or come to know. Further, having these relationship-less...