I’d like to thank the many hundreds of you who registered for the call center webinar I moderated today about Amazon’s Mayday button. It was truly great and I was blown away by how the companies (many in the Fortune 500) attending the webinar were so far ahead of the curve compared with typical organizations. For example when asked how many companies were looking to transform customer service from a necessary function for resolving customer problems into a value-generating service that is a strategic differentiators in the market, a whopping 83% responded in the affirmative. Wow!

In other news, I tweeted today about the increasing call center costs of the Obamacare “affordable care act” enrollment numbers which caused respected contact center analyst Paul Stockford to reach out. He pointed out to me that many of the call center agents hired to support this new law thought they were getting full time jobs when they applied. Instead, they got part time jobs with no health care. This, as a result of what they call “part-timeization” or the move to hiring government workers on a part-time basis.

Paul points out the obvious irony here – hiring people intentionally with no healthcare benefits to help people get healthcare benefits. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.