Many teens send 100-plus texts a day, survey says

(CNN) -- As most parents of adolescents know all too well, text messaging has become the preferred method of communication for American teenagers, with one in three teens sending more than 100 texts a day, a new survey says.

The survey by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project illustrates the indispensable role that text messaging, and mobile phones in general, play in the lives of today's teenagers.

Three-quarters of 12- to 17-year-olds own cell phones, up from 45 percent in 2004, and daily text messaging to friends has increased rapidly in recent years.

The research, made public Tuesday, confirms that teens make and receive far fewer phone calls than text messages. They primarily use their phones for voice calling when communicating with parents, although they prefer text messaging when it comes to communicating with their peers.

Although teens make or receive about five calls a day, half of them send a minimum of 50 text messages a day, the survey found.

"Texting is so functional and efficient," said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist at Pew, when asked to explain the survey results. "It's convenient and fits into those small spaces in daily life. You're not talking about much, but you're telling people you're connected to them."

How do teens manage to send so many text messages while spending the better part of Monday through Friday in the classroom?

Forty-three percent of teens who take their phones to school reported sending at least one text message from class a day, despite the fact that many schools have banned cell phones in class.

Lenhart said this just goes to show how important text messaging is to teens.

"Teenagers have been looking for ways to skirt around rules and defy administrators for millennia, whether it's passing notes in class or passing digital notes in class through cell phones," she said.

And teenage girls are doing most of the texting. Girls send and receive about 80 text messages a day, while boys send and receive only 30.

This is not a surprising find, according to Pew, as females also use other communicative tools more than males. Girls will text for social reasons more so than boys will, the survey found. For example, 59 percent of girls text their friends multiple times a day "just to say hello," as opposed to 49 percent of boys who do the same.

The fact that girls use their cell phones more than boys might be one reason that of the 64 percent of parents who have monitored their teens' cell phones, the vast majority are parents of 12- to 13-year-old girls.

"It's a historic relationship. ... Parents tend to regulate girls more than boys for a variety of social and gender reasons," Lenhart said.

Teens are using their phones to record and share their daily experiences, Lenhart said. In addition to texting, 83 percent of teens use their mobile phones to take pictures, and 64 percent of teens share their pictures with others.

During focus groups, Lenhart said, she asked teens what they liked to take pictures of with their cell phones. The most common answers: their pets, the people in their lives and the funny things they want to share with their friends.

Lenhart said the growth of wireless carriers' unlimited texting plans has made it easier for teens to communicate via text message.

"It's like the all-you-can-eat plan," she said. Teenagers "don't have to worry about cramming everything into 160 characters anymore. ... It doesn't cost 20 cents to send 'OK' to a friend."

The Pew survey was conducted last summer on landline and cell phones, and it included 800 youths ages 12-17, plus one of their parents.

For the original article, click here.

Coming soon: Call centers that don't suck

Just about every consumer who has dealt with a call center has faced the frustration of navigating through an unending sea of menu options or waiting eons to talk to a human being only to wind up with the least helpful employee.

Those annoyances and inefficiencies wear away at customers' satisfaction with the company they're dealing with, and that can ultimately cut into the company's bottom line.

But all is not lost. Real help may be on the way.

A new service developed by IBM (IBM, Fortune 500) and specialty insurance provider Assurant Solutions (AIZ, Fortune 500) plays matchmaker between customers and call center reps. IBM's service, called the Real-time Analytics Matching Platform (RAMP), connects customers with the call center employee best qualified to serve their individual needs.

Currently, most call centers only match an agent's availability and product mix expertise with the customer's particular product, making it an inexact science, to say the least.

"It's a little bit of a crap shoot regarding who you're going to talk to when you call a call center," said Toby Cook, analytics practice leader at IBM Global Business Services. "We combined our expertise in contact centers with our analytics to take it to another level. It's like speed dating for contact centers."

How it works
When a call comes in, RAMP instantly pulls up data about the customer, including past purchases and previous calls. The system then cross-analyzes that data with the skills of each call center agent.

Finally, RAMP uses its so-called "matching engine" to connect the customer with the best-suited agent within an acceptable amount of time.

For example, if a customer were to dial into a wireless company's call center, RAMP would be able to determine what phone the customer has, how much he or she uses it, what features the customer uses, and other identifying factors like the customer's age. The service would process all that information and match up the customer with a representative who has had past success with others who fit that criteria.

Traditional call centers might treat all customers who own the same BlackBerry models the same, but that can fall short when it comes to providing the best help. One BlackBerry user might be a global business traveler, while another user might be on a family plan and like to send a lot of text messages.

IBM's technology daily measures call center reps' success with a number of factors, including the number of customers they convince to stay with the company. RAMP also determines long-term success: some customers may be convinced to stay with the company after speaking to a rep, but then call back later to cancel.

All of RAMP's analytics are done in a matter of seconds. And since the system matches the analytics with data about customers' acceptable wait-time thresholds, IBM says the time customers spend on hold has either stayed the same or, in some cases, improved.
A success story

Though RAMP only became commercially available in the past few weeks, it has been through about six years of testing.

In 2004, Assurant Solutions took note of its call center issues and developed the analytics-based routing technology that underpins RAMP.

"We took data that has been there for a long time, but hasn't been exploited,' said Cameron Hurst, director of Assurant Solutions. "There haven't been a lot of new ideas in call centers in a long time, but we think this is a new angle on an old business."

Though IBM's version of the system is enhanced and portable, Assurant's more rudimentary system still had a drastic impact on the company's sales figures.

The help desk
Assurant determined that matching customers with the best-suited call center agents for their needs not only improved customer satisfaction, but it also boosted the company's sales. After the first year of using its new technology, Assurant's revenue from its call center rose 29%, and sales through customer retention grew 37%.

The system improved Assurant's call-center attrition rate too. As the system matched up call center reps with situations they would succeed in, agent morale improved. Like at many call centers, Assurant's call center reps are paid on commission.

"The more customers they save and the more they sell, the more money they make," said Hurst. "The system has a knack of delivering the right customer to the right rep, giving the reps the highest opportunity for success. They love it, and it has resonated very, very well with our customers."

For the original article, please click here.

Nightshift: 'Different lifestyle in reverse'

CNN Editor's note: Saeed Ahmed is a newsdesk editor at CNN Wire whose workday begins shortly before midnight. Watch "Nightshift In Focus," a one-hour special hosted by Tom Foreman, at 3 p.m. ET Saturday on CNN.

Every night when America puts on its PJs and heads to bed, I -- and thousands of others like me -- head out the door.

We are part of a sizable, but largely invisible, army of workers that clocks in after dark: cops and cabbies, DJs and deliverymen, jailers and journalists.

You call us "graveyard shift-ers." We call you "9-to-5-ers" or, if we're feeling envious, "normal."

A new CNN/Opinion Research poll found 46 percent of Americans have worked the night shift at some point in their lives. And, not surprisingly, more than half of those who did said they hated it.

Living life backwards is a challenge.

We rest best when our body is secreting high levels of melatonin, the hormone that regulates our awake and sleep cycles. And, says Dr. Thomas LoRusso, those levels begin to increase around 10:30 p.m.

"Between 2 to 4 o' clock in the morning, that level peaks. So, it's real easy to fall asleep between 2 to 4 in the morning," says LoRusso, a pulmonary sleep specialist at the Northern Virginia Sleep Diagnostic Center.

"And when you come home from a night shift, you're trying to fall asleep at a time when there's bright light. And bright light naturally suppresses those melatonin levels."

So what do you do? If you're my co-worker, you sip a glass of wine with your cereal to relax. If you're me, you pull tight your blackout curtains and hope the beagle doesn't howl.

"It is a different lifestyle in reverse. Eating patterns are all off, your sleeping patterns are all off," says Michael Fitten, who operates a tram that ferries passengers between Manhattan and Roosevelt Island in New York from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.

But night shift work is more than just an inconvenience. Research has shown that it makes us prone to diabetes, obesity, heart disease, even cancer.

A study published last year in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that night shift work causes the body's internal mechanism to go amok.

It produces less leptin, the hormone that tells us when to stop eating.

Blood pressure shoots up. Glucose and insulin levels skyrocket.

Still, about 21 million workers continue to work hours outside the norm, the U.S. Labor Department says.

For some, it's a matter of choice.

We like the pace of the shift and the close relationships we cultivate with the handful of workers who're up in the dead of night. The counter-commute doesn't hurt. Neither does the differential pay.

Others who toil in the dark don't have much say.

Lynette Slaton has worked as a baker in New York for three years. The hours are a necessity: the goods have to be ready for sale by dawn. But Slaton finds the timing has an upside: She has a hand in raising her children during the day.

"When I look at them, I want them to have so much. But right now, with the way the economy is and everything, I just feel more secure being able to be with them and not having to put them in a day care setting so young."

I have always worked nights. First, as a newspaper reporter covering cops and crime. Now, as an editor at CNN Wire, keeping an eye on the world while America sleeps.

Despite the years spent in this cycle, I still gulp gallons of coffee and sneak a 15-minute power nap in a darkened conference room from time to time.

I suspect I sabotage myself by trying to keep "regular" hours on days off:

My internal clock keeps resetting itself, throwing off my circadian rhythm.

Working nights allows me to be a stay-at-home dad during the day spending time with my 7-year-old daughter, Zahra, and 2-month-old son, Samir.

"Books and bottles by day; bombs and bodies by night." That's how I compartmentalize my life.

Like my fellow night owls, I've had to make some trade-offs for this privilege, not just psychologically and physiologically but socially.

I get to spend little time with friends and family here. On the other hand, the time difference means my parents in Bangladesh -- 11-hours ahead of Atlanta -- can share with me what they had for lunch while I snack on a chocolate bar in the middle of the night.

Across the country, we night denizens do what we do to keep life well-oiled and running for everyone else.

At Philips Arena in Atlanta, workers race against the clock to convert an ice rink into a basketball court when the Atlanta Thrashers and the Atlanta Hawks have back-to-back games.

"When everybody else is asleep, this is when this building can change from one thing to the next," says Barry Henson, the arena's vice president of building and event operations.

In Las Vegas, Nevada, Kevin Hentzell works nights replacing burnt or nonworking signs in the neon capital of the world. It's hard work -- the temperature easily exceeds 140 degrees by the signs and Hentzell must exercise caution so he's not electrocuted by the 15,000-volts zipping through the light bulbs.

Why do it at night? It's easier to spot outages in the dark.

Sure, it's an unusual way to live, but we take comfort in small victories.

This weekend, when Daylight Savings Time rolls around, you will lament losing an hour's sleep.

I will rejoice and leave work early.

For the original article, click here.

Folks losing homes dial 1-800; no one answers

• Many homeowners facing foreclosure say getting through to banks is nightmare.
• "After being on the phone with them, they send you to an automated lady."
• Lenders say they're overwhelmed by the amount of calls, doing all they can.
• Lawyer: "In the meantime, lenders are continuing to move forward with foreclosure."

The entire ordeal has been draining, especially trying to reach somebody at the bank. "You call them. After being on the phone with them, they send you to an automated lady. [Then] they send you to a Web site after you've been on the phone for an hour." Banks and lenders say that they have been overwhelmed with calls and that they're doing all they can to help ease the situation for Americans in distress.

Megan Cavallari waits on hold for more than an hour with her bank as she tries to save her home from foreclosure. Then she gets the "automated lady" -- again. It's happening to Americans time and again, with some put on hold for 2 ½ hours. "The waiting time is ridiculous," one attorney said. "They called 800 numbers that went into a black hole."

Read More