The call center is a vital link to a company's customers. It's also something of a money pit. Fortunately, customer service executives polled by Network World say many things can be done to reduce costs and ease administration.

Here is their advice for breeding call center success:

Shop around. "Definitely look at three vendors, at least," says Andre Harris, director of reservation training and quality assurance at Houston's Continental Airlines. Harris and her team investigated call-monitoring products for two years before choosing software from Witness Systems. Before finalizing the deal, Continental ran a six-month pilot in one of its four U.S. call centers, where 5,200 agents handle 60 million calls per year.

Look for a long-term partner, adds Jim LaManna, director of customer service at financial services software maker FutureTrade of Lake Forest, Calif. You need to be comfortable that your vendor contacts "will roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty and do whatever it takes to not only complete the implementation successfully, but also continue to support your needs in the future," LaManna says.

Look ahead. Start-up FutureTrade, which makes a direct-access trading platform for institutional investors, is essentially starting from scratch with CRM, LaManna says. The company's immediate need was for a support application. But FutureTrade considered other departments that might need software down the road, such as human resources and financials. "We did our requirements assessment based on needs of an entire enterprise, even though we were going to focus our implementation on support," LaManna says. The company chose PeopleSoft for its broad portfolio and Web-based technology. FutureTrade eventually will have a lot of users in the field, so Web-accessible data is key, LaManna says.

Listen to users. Being successful in the IT department requires understanding what users do and what they need to make their jobs easier and more effective, says Scot Struminger, vice president of IT at FedEx. The Memphis, Tenn., company uses ClarifyCRM from Amdocs to connect 16 U.S. call centers and approximately 3,000 customer service representatives who manage more than 300,000 customer interactions each day in the U.S. "I like to go and sit with agents a lot and listen to calls. It's the best way to understand, from a development point of view, what you need to do," he says. To his peers Struminger says, "this should be in your top five things to do to be successful."