The Readerboard

This just in: Poor Customer Service is Top Reason Customers Switch Service Providers. In other news, the sun rose in the east this morning. I'll issue a full report about it later in my blog: you can download it for $1,995.

I wish the analyst community� wouldn't keep shocking us like this.

There is news this morning that San Mateo-based Contactual (formerly White Pajama) has found a distributor in Japan, Vitstage, to distribute the Contactual solution to the Japanese market. You'll recall that Contactual was one of the first hosted-delivery contact center solutions available to the market. (Vitstage plans to co-market and co-brand the Contactual solution with its own product, inspirX.)� This makes Contactual's second international licensing agreement.

It's been a long time since anyone referred to call centers as "boiler rooms," but this was, in fact, a very apt description of them in the early 1980s. Call center work was a job one took when the alternative was starving. "Technology" meant push-button phones rather than rotary dials, and when a call center worker was asked at parties what he or she did for a living, the better response was, "I break legs for loan sharks." It sounded more desirable.

Things are, obviously, much different nowadays.