Speech Heads, if you haven’t caught BBC 4’s Fonejacker, you are missing on on some speech hilarity. Fonejacker is the brain child of British-Iranian comedian, Kayvan Novak. Building on the rich cultural tradition of acts like The Jerky Boys, the show revolves around a slew of characters that Novak voices and uses to prank call unsuspecting Britons.

Of special note to us Speechies, Novak has a routine where he calls live operators and harangues them as if they were IVRs, reminding us of the pitfalls of the increasingly complicated natural language systems we love so well.

Talk about some comedy gold, my brother, Adam B., says this stuff is so speech-larious that it makes milk come out his nose–and he can’t even drink milk. He’s heinously lactose intolerant!

Hope the same doesn’t happen to you!

At Speech Tech Blog, we are big fans of callcentrehelper.com, the UK’s most popular online call center magazine.

And as such we can’t help but highlight Steve Norman’s recent post about how to drive call elimination during a recession.

Speech-Heads will definitely want to check out Norman’s post for themselves.  But in the meantime, here are his seven tips for driving call elimination and improving first call resolution.

Norman’s Tips:

1. Understand Customer Motivations
2. Measure The Right Things
3. Turn Advisers Into Customer Advocates
4. Provide More Than Just On-The-Job Training
5. Technology-Enable The Front Line
6. Take Advantage of Real-Time Data Analytics
7. Manage The Customer Life Cycle

And don’t forget:  All the details of each tip can be found here.

So, have you ever noticed how many images of people speaking on headsets/in call centers are on the Web? Or used in ads for contact center technology providers? Because, ugh….I have. So, I decided to make a little gallery of some of my favorites. Click on the link to see the photo in question!

This one is confusing – is she outside? Is she in a glass-encased environment? What exactly is going on here? She also looks totally Scandinavian. I can spot a fellow Viking anywhere.

I am super high-tech call center agent. I have 0’s and 1’s in front of me to represent the Information Age, computers, and the vast array of information contained within my call recorders and speech analytics system.

I’m willing to bet good money this picture was made when “Roseanne” was still running original episodes. Either way, she’s having fun. And is that a headset/actual phone combo? Whoa!

Whoever made this image: thanks, you have totally creeped me out, and ruined my Friday night.

In the words of Wayne’s World : “Extreme close-up! Whoaaaa!”