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Call centers are an emerging opportunity for Print Service Providers looking to move into upstream, value-added business. Already, if you call Microsoft's Certification & Training center, your call is answered by a Bertelsmann employee in Burbank, CA. If you call John Deere's dealer support line your call is answered by an employee at Midland Information Resources in Davenport, IA.

These companies handle the printing, inventory, and fulfillment tasks for training or parts manuals. It was a natural extension to begin handling the questions that go along with these products. A call center doesn't have to be a huge enterprise (Midland's has four employees), but running a call center is nothing like the printing business. It requires a whole new set of skills and understanding.

If you're interested in how call center management could fit into your business, or want to better understand the value proposition for such an operation, James' work is a good place to start.

Tog on call centers. Bruce Tognazzini (aka "Tog") has written an excellent piece about How Call Centers can Make or Break Companies. This talks about the value that a call centre call can add to the business as a whole.

Interestingly, this is exactly what I wrote yesterday, when finalising the Powerpoint presentation for my talk at IIM 2002 on "Knowledge management for call centres".

For the record, these are the six advanced KM for call centres points at the end of my presentation:

• Building 'communities of practice' within call centres
• Developing relationships between customers and the organisation
• Call centres as a strategic corporate asset
• Call centres as a source of innovation
• Incorporating call centre expertise into research and development teams
• Integrating training, usability testing and knowledge management

(For more on this topic, see my full article.) [Column Two]