If Christine Kowalczyk, vice president at the Convergys Corporation, is to be believed, then Wednesday before lunchtime is the best time to call a customer service number to avoid being put on hold.

Industry observer Gregory Warner wrote recently that "I figured she should know; her company answered one billion customer service calls last year. Convergys is a company that lots of other companies pay to handle their customer calls."

Okay, so why Wednesday?

"It's hump day," Kowalczyk told Warner, who added that on Monday and Tuesday, people are still going through their weekend to-do lists: "By Wednesday it quiets down on the call center floor. Especially just before lunchtime."

Warner then reproduces a Customer Service Empathy Quiz. Sample question: How would you respond to the following call from a customer: "I was lost in a maze in a telephone menu, transferred to three different departments, and then put on hold for a total of 30 minutes. The customer service is horrible here! All I want to do is pay my bill!"

Read more here.

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BPA Quality, a supplier of 3rd party remote call monitoring, has produced a white paper answering what some feel is a rhetorical question: Should you monitor your call center agents? After all, it costs time and money, can't you just, you know, get good people, train them, give them the script and let 'em rock?

In heaven it'll be that way, yes. Down here, no.

We don't want to go all academic on you here, but as the white paper recounts, "in the early 1900's Harvard professors wanted to study the effect of light levels on productivity in manufacturing. Of the subjects they observed, they found no correlation between the light levels and performance."

Right, that's not what we care about anyway. We care about what they did find: "The employees they were studying performed better as they were observed. These employees performed better simply because they were aware that someone was watching their performance."

This led to the Hawthorne Effect: "An experimental effect in the direction expected but not for the reason expected; i.e., a significant positive effect that turns out to have no causal basis in the theoretical motivation for the intervention, but is apparently due to the effect on the participants of knowing themselves to be studied in connection with the outcomes measured."

Read more here.

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Let's start with the low-hanging fruit: Raise your hand if you think hosting an international conference call is far less expensive than arranging an in-person conference with participants located around the world.

Thank you, I see that hand... thank you... okay, if you did not raise your hand, please surf on over to find out what the Kardashian sisters are wearing tonight. Have a good one.

Are they gone? Good. Now, that conference call set up is easier than you may realize. But, according to industry observer Michael Framer, before you schedule the call, "you'll need to select a telecommunications provider that supports international conference calls as well as do a little pre-call organizing."

If your international conference calls will involve participants from different countries, find an international conference calling plan that supports those specific countries or offers "dial out" to those countries, Framer says: "The way international conference calling works, participants from other countries dial a toll free number for their countries in order to connect to the phone conference."

Read more here.

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Teo, a telecommunications company formerly known as Tone Commander Systems, has announced that it received TSG-6 certification for two new Power over Ethernet-enabled IP phone models from the National Telephone Security Working Group.

Teo officials say they're the first manufacturer to receive Committee on National Security Systems Class A certification for a PoE-enabled phone. And hey, we'll take their word for it.

Both new models include 802.3af PoE support and a built-in switched Ethernet port, company officials say, "which allows a single network connection to support both a PC and phone."

The U.S.-manufactured phones are described by Teo officials as being "industry-standard SIP compliant," and capable of working with virtually all SIP compatible systems, including Cisco, Avaya, Nortel, Asterisk, Shoretel and Broadsoft, as well as others.

"With these certifications," said Steve Hill, president of Teo, "we now have the largest range of TSG-6 approved telephone equipment in the industry."

Read more here.