"What gets measured, gets managed." - Peter Drucker Wanna see why your friends' jobs suck? It's right here. I can set a report to run every week to tell me who's turned over the most calls, who's called in more than once, who they talked to. i can create a phone pool that will feed calls based on how competent the call center employee is. If I consider them to be blocks in a diagram I can optimize the hell out of them. I can build an answerbase that will show them information based search terms. I can establish a callflow so that if you press 2, I know you've tried rebooting it. But you're right. I can't judge who's actually enforcing my brand and making me loved. This is one reason why I always ask to speak to the supervisor of whoever has been helpful. I figure I've had to do the "I'd like to speak to your manager" game enough times in my life that letting the good employee's bosses know they rule is my karmic duty. Here's the thing. That software? A lunkhead like me can get it up and running with about eight hours of training. It costs like $250 a year. I can throw a whole lot of minimum wage at it and be very little out of pocket. For not a whole lot more I can build out some case management software that will funnel contacts to the person who has dealt with the problem in the past, or has been well-rated by the customer. But that software costs about $20/mo/head. It doesn't take much to realize that "relationships" defines success and that the more happy people you have interacting with your company, the better your company will do. But it's not the first thing you stumble across, and it's not the cheapest thing you stumble across, so you kind of have to give a shit.