Love them or hate them, the contact centre is an institution from which we have been able to learn a great deal about our customers, shaping how we provide customer service as well as the products and services we supply.
The truth is call centres, or contact centres as they’re more commonly referred to now, often get a bad rap, with recent research from Whistl discovering that a bad call centre experience could see a business loose half their customers.
As time and technology have moved on, so to have attitudes to call centres but that’s not to say there aren’t still challenges faced by contact agents, we’ll explore this further on in the series.
The End of an Era
From manual switchboard-based telephone exchanges in the 1960s to the automated, voice activated phonelines of the modern day, telecommunication has come a long way over the years.
With advancements in technology, direct dialling and push-button phones pathed the way for a revolution in communication, with the seventies marking a pivotal point in the history of not only the call centre, but customer service.
In the UK, the last manual exchange switched to automatic dialling in 1976 and an International Subscriber Dialling System was introduced, meaning people could call both within the UK and abroad without the assistance of an operator.
Call centres were starting to emerge on a small scale, with companies such as Birmingham Press and Mail.
New technology – New techniques
The end of the switchboard era would mark the introduction of ‘toll free’ numbers and new technology which allowed businesses to adopt new sales techniques and using offices equipped to handle large volumes of incoming and outgoing calls, creating what we know today as call centres.
Call centres used PBX (Private Automated Business Exchanges) and offices were designed with rows and rows of agents and utilised Automatic Call Distributor technology, which simply put, answers incoming calls and automatically directs them to a specific department, much like the purpose of an IVR menu.
Big name businesses from British Gas to Barclaycard were among the first large corporations to embrace ACD technology to scale up their sales and customer service efforts. By 1972, the ten millionth telephone exchange line was installed in the UK as the use of the phone became more and more integral to businesses, just three years later that figure had doubled.
Outsourcing to Overseas
As business boomed, many businesses opted to look overseas to outsource their call centre operations and take advantage of lowering their operating costs. However, this came at the detriment of customer service, with public perception indicating that overseas agents were not as capable of dealing with their enquiries.
The call centre would soon become a new and vital component for UK businesses, completing changing the face of customer service. Companies embraced this new approach to sales and customer service, revolutionising the way we shopped, complained, received updates and more.
100 Years in the Making
1976 marked the centenary of the telephone. It’s strange to imagine that 100 years prior, the phone hadn’t fully been invented and yet 100 years on it was a part of daily life. People could now book plane tickets, make hotel reservations and speak with their bank, much more directly and efficiently than had ever been possible before.
Over the next 20 or so years, there’s many further advancements in technology and the relaxation of regulations on the UK telecoms industry help continue to improve the functionality and services a call centre can provide, with the 80s and 90s seeing a real boom in companies utilising operators and agents to grow their businesses.
No Signs of Slowing
The increase in demand for information dependant industries spurred on the growth of the call centre, and whilst the modern day call centre is a little more refined in its operations, it remains as one of the largest and rapidly growing sectors in the world.
Today there are over 6,000 contact centres across the UK, employing almost 800,000 people. From technical assistance to market research, bookings or emergencies, there’s not an industry in existence that doesn’t benefit from having someone on the end of the phone for their customers or clients to speak with.
An Agile Industry
We’ve seen all industries face challenges recently, adapting how to provide exceptional customer service at a time when companies have experienced huge disruption to their usual operations yet the contact centre has proved how agile it can be.
Adapting to new surroundings, working methods and technology to ensure businesses still functioned and customers were still updated and satisfied, the contact centre industry continues to flourish.
If you’ve recently experienced changes to the way your agents handle calls, then speak with us about our consultative customer experience services or our IVR options to ensure your customers stay happy and informed.