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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.

Turning live chats with your customers into actionable leads just got a tad easier thanks to Olark's intgration with SaaS CRM Salesforce.com.

Olark is a customer service live chat app that plugs into your preferred chat client and lets you engage visitors to your company's Website in real time.

I had one of those terrible and all-too-typical experiences yesterday. I had to call a customer service number. I called, struggling with the voice-activated answering system, cursing vociferously in hopes of triggering some sort of special mechanism to connect me directly to a real person. Finally my turn in the phone queue came and - of course, this is always how the story goes - the customer service rep was able to pull up my account information, verify it, answer my question, mail me the necessary paperwork (seriously, in 2011) and tell me to have a nice day. I waited on hold for about 20 minutes; talking to someone took about four minutes.

As I sat on hold, an automated voice reminded me that there were many things I could do if I went to the organization's website instead. Alas, not in my case. The website had some forms and an FAQ, sure, but much to my chagrin, I had to call the toll-free number.

Atlassian, New Relic, OTRS, Pivotal Labs, Service Now, SugarCRM, and Zendesk have agreed to support a common JSON API specification for customer service applications called NetworkedHelpDesk.org.

The idea is to make it possible for all applications related to a customer's experience to talk to each other, from help desk to bug tracking to project management. "Where things start to fall through the cracks is when customer service has to cross organization boundaries," says Zendesk COO Zack Urlocker. "Either within the organization, like customer service to engineering, or outside of the organization like to a component vendor."

Two new apps are helping improve the online customer experience by tying in advanced communications technologies in interesting ways. The apps, MyCyberTwin and Radish System's ChoiceView, offer to remove some of the misery and tedium involved in getting help and have wide potential applications in customer support, problem resolution, and other situations. Deplolyed properly, they could increase conversion rates and improve the delivery of online customer service. Let's take a closer look at both.

You probably won't want to replace all your call center PCs with iPads, and doing "real" support work likely requires a full keyboard. But we're betting at least a few of your customer support staff have to either take work home with them or monitor issues outside of the office. Accessing the customer service help desk from the road probably isn't a good justification for buying an iPad, unless you have a lot of reps in the field using help desk software. But help desk access is a good use for iPads that your company or your employees already won.

The help desk for the iPad market seems to be just getting started. Here's a look at what's available so far.

This morning my home wifi was having trouble and I posted a message to Twitter saying, "My wife has decided to start the day with a call to Comcast customer service, I should have offered to poke her in the eye with a spoon. Would have been more fun for her." Within minutes a man named Bill (@ComcastBill, really) publicly replied to ask if he could help.

I didn't think much of it, I assumed he was camped on a search.twitter results page for the word "Comcast" or maybe had subscribed to an RSS feed for the search. It turns out though, that far more than that was happening behind the scenes. An extensive machinery of tracking, delegation and analysis stood between Bill and my little Tweet. Maybe it has to be that way, maybe it's a good thing - but there's something deeply disturbing about it too.

MeasuredUp is a review service that allows customers to share their positive and negative experiences about local or online businesses, but until now, these businesses did not really have a chance to reach out to these customers through the service and rectify potential customer service issues. Now, MeasuredUp has introduced a new featured, Direct Connect, which allows companies to claim their identity on the service and reach out to their customers.