Company lines

Stephen Farnum is uncommonly gregarious for a lifelong New Englander. The middle-age father of three has salt-and-pepper hair, a warm smile, and big bear hands that he uses to carve circles in the air when he's making a point.

Mr. Farnum's voice is the voice of Harbor Sweets. And Chanel. And Samsonite. For all three of those firms, and more than 40 others, he picks up a handful of the 1-800 order lines that millions of people use each day to contact the world of retail.

Many shoppers expect to conduct business 24 hours a day, seven days a week, via phone or e-mail. To cope, large corporations and small retailers are outsourcing customer service to third-party specialists. Outside operators like Farnum now answer 1 of 3 customer calls.

Most service centers operate in large warehouses filled with hundreds of employees. These "agents" usually sit at cubicles answering phones and e-mails about 8 hours a day. They often juggle scripts from as many as 50 companies - and an emphasis is placed on efficiency.

Companies value such centers, often spending 25 percent more to farm work out than it would cost to keep it in house. But critics say the centers represent what is wrong with customer service - that they are too impersonal, emphasizing speed over courtesy and know-how.

Others suggest that, in an era of global commerce, in-house customer service might no longer be a realistic option.

For three years, Farnum has worked as a customer agent at Taction, Maine's first call center. Formerly known as New England 800 Company, Taction is friendlier and more personal than most of its large competitors.

The staff is a mix of post-baby boomers and recent high school graduates. Women dominated Taction's workforce a decade ago. The company now has an equal number of male operators.

The atmosphere is relaxed. An ornate white tin ceiling sits over the main room where agents receive calls. Many of the hardwood cubicles are bedecked with Beanie Babies.

Steve White, Taction's chief executive officer, says the low-key tone eases agents' nerves and helps them be more personable with callers.

"We clearly try to avoid a pressure-cooker environment," says Mr. White.

Yet the pressures of the job are always apparent. A wall-mounted electronic scoreboard displays the number of callers on the phone, and the number of calls yet unanswered. At about 3 o'clock during a summer afternoon, the sign reads "24 shared, 11 waiting."

The data are in plain view on each agent's phone, where a screen displays the number of calls waiting, the length of the longest call on hold, and the time elapsed on the agent's current call.

Agents sit in front of computers, wearing headsets. They answer calls and e-mails all day, except for two 15-minute breaks and a half hour for lunch.

Mr. Farnum says the need to move quickly through each call was made clear when he arrived on the job. "When I first started working here, they were very conscious of having us work fast," he says.

Agents must be familiar with a wide range of accounts. Taction's list of clients includes Chanel, Harbor Sweets, publisher McGraw Hill, and Samsonite.

Taction worker Sandie Jones, a native of Portsmouth, Ohio, admits to having mixed up her clients from time to time. She once received an order request for tools and confused the company with another client that sells lingerie. "I thanked the customer for buying metal underwear," she says.

Lincoln County has one of Maine's tightest labor pools. But a recent round of layoffs at an atomic power plant has expanded the workforce. One consequence: Wages are low.

When Farnum first began training, he earned $8 an hour. He received a dollar raise when he began working the night shift.

The late hours, and exposure to all types of customers, leaves the staff open to some difficult calls. Impolite callers are not a rarity.

Farnum recently took a call from a customer who claimed she hadn't been credited for returning a pair of shoes.

She raised her voice when Farnum informed her that the computer did not have a record of her purchase. He began coolly checking pieces of information, and she relaxed. "They'll calm down if you are calm," he says.

Agent Peggy DeLange says she sometimes hangs up when a caller gets out of hand. She says customers frequently lose their temper when they can't get something done the way they want it, when they want it.

"Callers will get a little more opinionated when there's ... space between you and them," says Ms. DeLange.

They may have more reason to complain. Experts say quality at most customer centers has flagged in the past few years because of efforts to shift to 24-hour service despite a tight labor pool.

Some centers have set up offices overseas, where labor is cheap. It's not uncommon for customers to be served by agents in India and Turkey, says Alexsander Szlam, president of eshare communications, a Norcross, Ga.-based softwaremaker for call centers.

Some companies, like Kodak, have kept service in-house, and strengthened it by reacquainting in-house agents with the company's front lines. Last year, the film giant sent many of its operators to retail outlets for some old-fashioned experience.

But the demand for speed, critics say, keeps driving the trend toward outsourcing to relatively uninformed agents.

And at overburdened call centers, that speed takes a toll.

"People are timed constantly. They are afraid to spend more than a few seconds on the phone with someone who needs more help," says Elaine Berke, president of EBI consulting in Westport, Mass. "They want people to be on the phone for a maximum of two to four minutes."

Call centers' tools have become unnervingly sophisticated, Ms. Berke says, as managers push to gather more data.

That can have an impact on how customers are handled. Centers can, for example, prioritize some calls over others, based on customer profiles. Ms. Berke says credit-card companies most often engage in such "segmenting."

"If a customer is in the top tier, they might get their call answered sooner.... A low-tier caller could get their call dropped altogether."

The popularization of the Web has been a boon for service centers. In 1994, Stream, a service center based in Canton, Mass., was one of the first firms to go online. Stream's new chat service lets agents speak with six customers at once. Agents type a query into a search engine, and a menu of likely solutions pops up on the screen.

But if technology has aided the flow of service, it has at times shown weaknesses. It is not uncommon for customers to send questions to a service center via e-mail and receive no response for weeks, if at all.

Other callers enter the labyrinth of automated voice prompts, only to hit dead ends. It's the kind of experience that causes many to scream for a little human contact.

"Technology becomes insensitive to people," says Mr. Szlam. "It's gotten to the point where people are getting tired of [it]."

The technological push in customer service may be hard to restrain. Companies' marketing arms turn to call centers with the most technology - not only to process customers, but also to collect data on their buying habits.

"Companies create massive annual marketing plans, but no sort of customer retention plan," says Edward Gagnon, president of Customer Service Solutions in Charlotte, N.C.

Experts say many firms churn through too much customer traffic to offer a personal touch. But Mr. Gagnon believes a firm's commitment to customers can be reflected by the people who answer its phones. "When you're talking about the person facing the customer," he says, "you're talking about corporate culture."