ReadWriteEnterprise

Earlier this week Avaya announced new contact center products that integrate with social media. Avaya, one of the descendants from Ma Bell, supplies telephony hardware and software to some of the largest enterprises and telecommunications companies in the world, and they are getting seriously Facebook'd.

It isn't all that surprising, really. Avaya isn't some old fuddy-duddy phone company. It has been a huge user of social media for its own purposes for quite some time.

We've questioned before the value of investing in contact center technology without improving call center conditions, and the ability of outsourced labor (regardless of whether it is also off-shored) to provide good customer service. These are the types of questions that are important for business decision makers to ask. If you want to go a bit further, you can read this story in Mother Jones about the experience of a writer from the U.S. training to work in a center in India. It doesn't provide much detail as to whether you should or shouldn't outsource your customer service functions (or to who), but it doesn't provide an interesting perspective on the conditions of these workplaces.

"Call centers treat agents like slave labor," writes Forrester analyst Kerry Bodine. She suggests that instead of spending money on the latest technology - cloud, mobile, social analytics and all that stuff we like so much - companies should invest more into their call center employees. Why invest in those employees, instead of advertising campaigns, better websites or social CRM? Because those call center workers reach more customers each month than any marketing campaign.