Assuming you’re paying for your own education (a few get by on fellowship grants), you can expect to earn less upon graduation than someone who did the same program ten years ago. It’s not so much that salaries are down—although they are, on average—but more that the costs are up. An MBA degree at one of the top ten business schools in the country, the price of getting a degree, which easily tops $100,000 today, has risen three times faster than the median salaries they gather.

Part of the reason could be that MBAs have become a popular recourse for out-of-work professionals who got hit by the financial crisis. As companies fired highly-paid managers and directors to streamline, the newly unemployed sought to beef up their resumes by using what savings they had on prestigious business degrees. Of course, now there are so many degree holders that some of that prestige has worn off.

Of the top business schools, the Tepper School at Carnegie Mellon University showed the largest drop in salary-to-tuition rations: costs of attending have risen 12.8 times more than graduates’ median starting salaries. The McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas is a close second with a ratio of 11.7 times. At Columbia University, tuition for the two-year program has gone up by about $70,000 (now at over $169,000), while median salaries have dropped from $100,000 per year to just $93,000.

If you’re still bent on getting that degree, your best bets are the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Chicago Booth. At Stanford, the salary-to-tuition ratio is only 1.6, and 2.2 at Chicago. The Stern School of Business at New York University and MIT Sloan are also fairly reasonable with a ratio of 2.4.

Another option, apart from getting a grant or having your job pay for it, is to go to a local business school where much lower resident fees often apply. Studies usually consider tuition for out-of-state students as many people choose to travel for their MBAs. This may leave some of the top schools out of the question, but for their price, you may actually be getting a better deal.

As with any other business product, there’s a wide range of choices out there, and there’s no single answer as to what will work best for you. Among the first things you’ll want to consider are your needs: do you want an inbound contact center or just a way to keep track of names and addresses? Are you going to run the software yourself or do you have a team assigned to it? Some programs will even provide virtual agents, although this is best for large-scale operations. Before looking, take a look at your current customer service activity and set a goal that’s just above what you need.

When you actually start shopping around, you may be surprised at how many choices there actually are. How do you know where to start? One way to narrow down your choices is to look at recent industry publications or analyst reports. The names of the top vendors should be among the most frequently mentioned. Once you’ve got a shortlist of three to five, check off each feature and see if they have all the services you need. It may also help to read up on the publisher’s background and call up other business owners for opinions.

If your business is already quite established, integrating the customer service program can be tricky. Make sure your software can link up with your phone system—there’s no use installing software if you can’t automate the recording. Ideally, you’ll want both inbound and outbound call support, especially if you have a large outfit that does regular marketing reports.

Finally, you’ll have to consider price. Although a good customer service solution doesn’t come cheap, you don’t have to shell out that much for quality. List prices tend to be inflated, so when you negotiate, always use the standard marked-down price as your benchmark. One of the best strategies is to get the cheapest package that will do the job, but keep the option open to add new features as the need arises. After all, you don’t want just a tool to get things done—you want something that can grow with your business and adapt to constantly changing environments.

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The Age

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Sydney Morning Herald

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BBC News

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Brisbane Times

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