A few years back, when the Internet was just a shiny new toy, I created a model of call center development that tried to show how the center evolves in its relationship with the organization it s a part of. It was a good model, describing with a fair degree of accuracy the struggles that a call center has to go through to deliver better service at a consistently high level of efficiency and lower cost.

The reason you create a model is to explore the general principles that guide a process, in this case, the process of service delivery. Since I created the Six-Stage Model, much has changed in the outside world that affects how call centers operate, and how they change over time. The very idea of CRM, which tries to grapple with the consequences of the later stages, but not always successfully.

The difference between my Six-Stage Model and other descriptions of how call centers work is that my explanation has less to do with what technologies are used, and more with...