“With the new year comes new year's resolutions.”

For Dan Boehm, Vice President of Sales and Marketing forSpectrum Corporation, they do, anyway. Haven’t seen much in the way of a New Year’s resolution around this reporter’s house ever since our young son said “If there’s something you want to do, why do you have to wait for next year to start doing it?”

But it’s cultural, to resolve to stop smoking, lose weight or be a better person, as Boehm says. The gym is busier for the first couple weeks in January, then by about Valentine’s Day attendance is back to normal.

There might be a point to making New Year’s resolutions, though, if you manage a call center. As Boehm says, “one way you can be a better person is to review and change your metrics, thresholds and reports.” And that would make a fine New Year’s resolution. As would “Drink more red wine.” Hey we all like an easily-kept resolution now and then.

Reviewing and changing your metrics, thresholds and reports “will make you a better person,” Boehm says, “because your agents and supervisors will love you for it! Call centers are dynamic. Every year there is something new from the company that the call center must deal with. Everyone in the call center needs to adapt to these changes. Yet the agents and supervisors are still looking at the same metrics, responding to the same thresholds and seeing the same reports from last year.”

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It’s true that 3rd party remote call monitoring can be used to not only drive customer satisfaction but also dramatically increase business efficiency when used correctly. A recent study from BPA International, written by Craig Antonucci, director of Client Strategies, MBA and professor of Decision Sciences, points out some of the ways this is done.

First, determine critical activities. What activities make or break your call center? If you are a 911 dispatcher, being able to get the emergency group to the right home is the critical activity. Be sure to identify these critical activities and make them high focus, key measurements, and high penalty for failure at the agent level. If you fail to measure this, you might as well be the cook who doesn’t wash his hands.

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This reporter remembers when “just in time” was the hot, desirable practice for keeping on-hand inventories low. Turns out it’s good for call center training as well.

Harmony officials recently featured their Coach and Learn modules as ways businesses can “put knowledge in the hands of those who need it, when they need it the most.”

Sounds like something your business could do with? Read on.

These integrated contact center coaching and e-learning modules provide what KnoahSoft officials characterize as “a collaborative feedback loop between the agent and the supervisor to delivery training content and messages to agents just in time to improve their efficiency and enhance productivity.”

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Five9 officials recently touted their call center on demand products’ integration with some of the most popular CRM products available today, such as Salesforce.com, RightNow and NetSuite.

Great. But what’s the basic business case there in the first place?

Lots of companies today are moving from premise-based technologies to cloud computing platforms, and Five9 provides on-demand call center software that is pre-integrated with CRM “specifically to provide a robust and predictable migration path for companies to take advantage of the benefits that cloud computing can provide,” Five9 officials say.