Our editor Keith Dawson is quoted in an article from the Lexington Herald-Leader (Kentucky) about the emerging trend of using call centers to take fast food orders from drive-thrus.

Miami Management, a company that owns 16 Kentucky Wendy's restaurants, has been testing outsourcing drive-thru orders at two locations. The call center is located elsewhere in the area.

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Start your week right with these fascinating call center news updates from the U.S. and Canada.

Why are bad customer service stories so fascinating? I just spent a couple minutes enraptured by a tale of mediocre service at Chuck E. Cheese Pizza posted on the VocaLabs blog. It wasn't call center related, but still, it kept my attention. I wanted to know what would happen next. Would the customer get free video game tokens? Yes. What a relief.

I've started interviewing vendors for our annual CRM article, due out in the December issue of Call Center Magazine. One of the more charged questions I'm asking is based on something our editor Keith Dawson said in last year's article: "If your idea of CRM consists of putting customer data on an agent's desktop — and doesn't go any farther — then you are mismanaging that relationship."

News updates from America, Canada, the U.K., and the Dominican Republic.

From our renowned QueueTips section, another weekly selection of hard questions and good advice:

INTERNAL INSTANT MESSAGING IN THE CALL CENTER

Here's a guest post from ICMI vice president Jay Minnucci:

At the ACCE conference in Seattle last month, I began a discussion on what separates good call centers from great ones. One question I left unaddressed during the session is the one that I imagine most everyone would want to know: How do you know when a call center has been able to "break through" and join the elite class? We are still refining the common characteristics, but one already identified that I want to focus on today is simplicity.

Advertising Age says marketers and consumer research firms are in a panic over America's "opinion fatigue." Most consumers aren't as interested in answering market research questions over the phone anymore, and a small section of the population, the so-called "professional respondents," is all too eager to opine -- for a fee.

So on September 28, thirty market research executives met in Chicago to discuss at the "Research Industry Summit for Improving Respondent Cooperation."