The Emergence of the Call Centre

"More people have worked in call centres than ever worked in the mining industry”.
Matt Thorne, writer of Eight Minutes Idle shares this crazy statistic along with his experiences from working (and living) in a call centre.

Today around 4% of the UK’s workforce is employed by one of the UK’s 6000+ contact centres, and we’ve certainly seen a boom in business during lockdown. But how did the call centres of the late 80s develop to what we would describe as today’s modern day contact centre?

What do we have unlimited access to today which was only in its infancy in the 90s? The Internet!

It’s strange to think of a time when we didn’t have easy access to the internet. Imagine not having the ability to jump on a zoom meeting or buy something online.

Cast your mind back thirty years or so and the internet was slowly starting to be utilised by businesses who began to reap the benefits of the ease in increased communication and connectivity.

Technology In The Call Centre

In the late 80s big companies benefited from the technological advancements in ACDs (Automatic Call Distributor wiki) which allowed for automated exchanges and call routing, where callers listen to a voice recording then selected the department they would like to speak to, this was the beginning of the IVR system. The internet and call centre technology paved the way for companies to focus their entire business models on using contact centres as a way to do business.

The UK’s telecoms industry became deregulated in 1984 and this was a pivotal moment in creating a competitive telecommunications industry which was no longer dominated by monopolies, resulting in service costs dropping.

Deregulation encouraged new players to enter the market, increasing competition and resulting in the UK’s contact centre industry growing bigger than any other country aside from the USA.

By 1985, Direct Line was founded and became the first company to utilise the contact centre by selling insurance solely by phone. They stared with a team of just 63 and one contact centre and have paved the way in terms of customer centric and satisfaction led services.

Outsourcing & Off-shoring

Over the following couple of years, big name companies began to set up contact centres as a means to save money, with some outsourcing their needs to overseas call centres like entrepreneur Pramod Bhasin’s. This early adoption of a “quantity over quality” approach has led to some call centres becoming criticised for their operations and their approach to customer service.

As the factories and coal industry in the 1990s began to decline, the call centre was starting to boom, with Northern England and Wales being prime locations for new businesses to set up, piggybacking on the high unemployment rates.

This level of growth in the call centre allowed for many reasonably inexperienced people to gain employment which could be seen as a positive but led to an unhealthy working environment and culture. At this time, call centres used a script-based and unsolicited outbound calling approach. This resulted in customer dissatisfaction, high employment turnover rates and public perception of the contact centre was poor.

The running of early contact centres has been compared to the working environment of an industrial factory floor, with high quotas and little time for a personalised approach. Outsourced, offshore call centres, cost cutting and strained customer relations were rife by the end of the century. So, as the millennium approached, how could the call centre recover from such a tainted perception?

Turn of the century

We’ll be reviewing the contact centres of from the early 2000s to today’s in our next piece to highlight some of the major changes which have occurred in terms of operations, technology and most notably in call centre culture over the last few decades.

If you’ve not yet read part 1 in the series click here