It's two a.m. and your call center people are scattered about the country-side, each at their station with their usual set of quick-reference cards and FAQ lists, only, there's a difference happening, or rather, a difference that is not happening, but it could ...

Here's a shocker: Call-centre staff are people. They are real people with real lives and real interests, and they have common interests -- studies show that people are more alert and more effective when they tune to each other, they function better as a unit, sharing information, channeling business flow; this directed tuning drives a whole instant-messaging industry ... students know two heads are better than one when it comes to doing their homework, and they know twenty are better than two, so why do we design call-centers with each call handler firmly blindered to their call-queue (and their knitting).

Is it because we fear they may talk?

Guess what ...

They will talk anyway, so why won't we serve them?

Not only does the expert you need not work for you, you may not even know who they are until you need them, and with your prissy firewalled xenophobia, you're not likely to find them.

In 2002 we proposed incorporating a Jabber server into an emergency response call-center. We weren't quite laughed out of the office, but the topic was changed rather quickly, and this followed with a request to remove the link we'd added to the call-center portal console.

After all, the job here is to sit and wait and wait and wait for a disaster. The last thing you want is to have all those underpaid students enjoying themselves.

This could be a true call-centre transcript ... but only if we'd get our heads out of our cubic-holes and start thinking networking instead of thinking that networks are the sole domain of the Country Club set.

Social software works, people who use it do so every day and yet, fess up and tell the truth, what is the likelihood of that fictional transcript occuring online across any given Call-Center company, or worse between call center companies?

Yet anyone who has ever worked in a Call Centre knows that the above transcript happens off line, across the cubicle walls, many times in every shift, and it's partly to keep each other awake, partly to bide the time, partly just plain human needs to be connected to the people around us, but it could be done in the service of the Call Center and without compromising the basic humanity of it either.

So ... why not?