Randy Cohen's Ethicist column in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine had a call center-related question:

I was to screen candidates for a job at my office that requires considerable phone time with our high-end, snobbish customers. When my boss said, "Don't bring in anyone who wants to 'ax' you a question," my first reaction was that she wanted me to exclude African-Americans. My boss claims to support equal opportunity, but was she being racist here? -- name withheld, New York

Here's mine: This is a hiring question. As any conscientious hiring manager will tell you, discrimination and racial profiling is never appropriate. If we assume the best in the boss in the example above -- that she was not making a veiled request to avoid hiring people of a certain ethinicity -- then we're left with a question of good phone manner.

Call centers want to hire people who sound good on the phone. People with pleasant voices, who speak clearly.

But this can also be seen as a training question. Every center has its own style. Some rely on scripts so much that the individual agent's speaking style may not ever matter. Others want agents who will sound casual and unscripted. Most centers will train agents to answer calls the way they need them to answer calls.

Look at off-shore centers -- some Indian call centers will train their agents to sound like Americans or Britons. A great deal can be taught. So decide how much your center wants to teach and how much you want your applicants to bring to the job, but don't discriminate.

The funniest thing just happened as I sat here at my desk writing about call centers. My phone rang, and it was my local video store. As I wondered how on earth they tracked me down at work, a cheerful recording told me that I could rent movies two-for-one this weekend.

I was surprised; the only time the video store ever calls is when my movies are days overdue. A small place like this makes its money off of late fees, so there's a tension between getting the movies back so others can rent them and letting them stay out so fees can accumulate. It's a dying business model though. After some exorbitant fees (it's embarrassing how long it took me to figure out that this little shop didn't offer three day rentals), I changed my behavior in two ways: I bought more DVDs and I joined Netflix.

So it's apparent this little movie store is looking for some technological assistance. Why not outbound?

My editorial in the current issue of Call Center was headlined "Why the Masses are Wrong About IVR." Well, the masses had a lot to say in response.

In all the media ho-hah over the iPhone, is there anything left for us poor call center/telecom folk to say? Besides "I want one, right away, no matter what the cost"? Yes.

There's an interesting article in last week's New York Times about pre-hire assessments called "Google Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm."

"As we get bigger, we find it harder and harder to find enough people," Google’s Laszlo Bock, told the Times. "With traditional hiring methods, we were worried we will overlook some of the best candidates."

Google had been focusing on engineers with high college GPAs who interviewed well, but, Bock said, "Interviews are a terrible predictor of performance."

To find out what kind of people they needed, they asked the people they had -- with a 300 item questionnaire asking about knowledge, personaility, and behavior. It even asked about pets and reading habits. They compared the data to their employees' reviews and performance, analyzing two million data points. From that, Google analyst Dr. Todd Carlisle made surveys to give potential employees.

Then again, conceded Carlisle, "It’s like telling someone that you have the perfect data about who they should marry." But this ought to illustrate the importance of using all the information one can to make a sound hiring decision. No one's expecting that companies will cease to do interviews. But college grades aren't the only measure of potential, and neither are interviews.

Fortunately for the call center industry, there are well-established firms that have done the work for you so you don't have to come up with your own surveys and testing algorithms. We'll be talking to some of them in the next few days and we'll post some of their wisdom on the blog.

We're all really excited about the new Apple iPhone. Well, almost all of us. Dan Miller of Opus Research is skeptical:

"I can hardly express how profoundly disappointed I am that this shiny, new thing -– the first must-have product since Nintendo’s Wii -– has less voice processing than Tickle-Me Elmo."

And what of Cingular, the wireless service provider that secured an exclusive deal with Apple?

The good news, observed VocaLabs' CEO Peter Leppik before he corrected himself, is that Apple will be doing all the tech support for the phone, not Cingular. "Apple's decision to support the iPhone itself means that the company is determined to maintain control of the complete customer experience, and make sure the Apple brand keeps its value," He wrote.

If only it were so. As Leppik discovered later, Cingular actually is doing the support. Which makes his point all the more interesting: the Apple brand is golden. Why would Apple let Cingular's erratic customer service to taint it?

Cingular hasn't had the best record in customer service, according to VocaLabs' Sector Pulse reports. It's usually somewhere behind T-Mobile and Verizon, but well ahead of Sprint. The AT&T acquisition has done much to drag it down though.

I'm wondering how the exclusive partnership between Apple and Cingular will play out. I can't imagine happy Verizon and T-Mobile customers will risk losing their satisfactory service (and pay a contract cancellation fee for the priveledge) just to get the newest technology. I know I won't.

As David Pogue explains in his Ultimate iPhone FAQ:

Can it be used with anything but Cingular? –No.
Is it an "unlocked" phone, so I can use it with a carrier other than Cingular? –No.
Will there be a non-Cingular version? –Not within the first two years.
Can I put my T-Mobile SIM card in it instead of Cingular? –No.
But what if I keep asking? Then will it be available beyond Cingular? -No.
Is there a Verizon version? –NO!!!!

Just released this week is a new report that confirms our gut suspicions about the performance management sector - it's growing, and fast.

In our upcoming Staffing and Recruiting article, we talk about how important agent retention is to a call center. The other side of that is finding agents who match your call center's needs, skills, and culture. How do you zero in on the right candidates?

The answer is Pre-Hire Assessment Tools. As our chief technical editor Joe Fleischer wrote in last year's pre-hire assessment article:

"From a call center's perspective, the most important indicators of an agent's performance are those the center assesses before the agent comes on board. One challenge with assessments is that there is a difference between recognizing candidates who can help customers, and those who want to do so. You need different kinds of tools to reveal different information about what each candidate has to offer."

"There's so much more to determining whether or not someone is going to be a productive contributor in an organization than whether or not they can perform the job. That's a very important point. I'm not trivializing the importance of assessing job skills, I just think that people who are responsible for establishing these systems need to take the blinders off and better understand what it about people and jobs and how they overlap that is going to provide them with the best outcome."

It may not be easy to find the right agents, but there are plenty of firms that can help. Here's a partial Pre-Hire Assessment tools vendor list:

Some folks at the blog CRM Lowdown came up with an interesting list of the best and worst call centers of the year; I couldn't help but notice that their number one good center is 1-800-Flowers.com, one of our call center of the year award winners.

I also noticed that Verizon made their best list. At first I was incredulous. Verizon has come closer than any other company to making me turn into a "Super Empowered Angry Customer," using this blog as a bully pulpit.

But CRM Lowdown was circumspect:

Catriona Wallace, director of the Australian website Callcentres.net visited a Singapore women's prison last year, a prison that does some call center outsourcing with the help of a company called Connect Centre.

As frequent readers of this blog know, prison call centers are a subject of particular fascination for us, so we read Wallace's account on her website's blog eagerly:

"We were security checked and escorted by armed wardens to a call centre with greater than 50 seats which was totally behind bars and running on a smart technology platform supplied by a local Singaporean IT company, Innovax. The centre is an outsourced centre, established as part of a program to assist in the rehabilitation of inmates. We interviewed several agents working there and were totally impressed with their professionalism and dedication to the call centre job they had and to the industry. The call centre work is treated by inmates as a privilege and there is a very rigorous interview process for inmates to become agents."

To be sure, cheap labor is a big benefit, but what if UNICOR and some of its clients actually touted their prison workers? The former inmates I've spoken to have said that the work they did during their sentences was time well-spent -- it gave them purpose, pride, and (a rather small amount of) money. It also gave them valuable work experience that helped them reconnect with the world once they were released.

"It was great to see the contact centre industry being able to make a social contribution and all credit to the managers from Connect Centre who were also exceptional in their vision and dedication to this centre and its people," wrote Wallace in her blog.

A smart, public service-driven marketing campaign could turn a company's secret shame into a PR dream while helping turn convicts into tax-paying citizens again.