Act 2: The Telephone Booths

The development of fixed telecommunications networks starting from 1950 led to the birth of remote commerce and online customer relationships. Ordering products from the comfort of one's sofa, with a favorite online sales catalog in one hand and the receiver in the other, was a value proposition far too strong for consumers to resist quickly. Adding to this was the development of mass media, radio, and television, which rapidly established distance selling as an essential distribution network.

To accommodate all these customers, take orders, manage support, and orchestrate call campaigns to increase sales, the need for personnel, dedicated spaces, and suitable technical infrastructures became evident. Thus began the era of “telephone chairs,” and with it the stakes of FIFO (First In, First Out), LIFO (Last In, First Out), but never that of FOLI (First Out, Last In) ;) !

So here we are, from 1970, with tele-agents, tele-plateaus, and telecommunications infrastructures. From the creation of the first call centers, a fundamental observation was made: it is economically impossible to have as many agents online as there are client calls in progress. Contact centers, like airports and their airport racetracks, quickly organized to manage this asymmetry, with groups of agents, dedicated services, queues, call distribution engines, all coupled with software applications to welcome, qualify, route, distribute, record, and measure call flows.

This strong economic constraint immediately led to performance objectives: maximum client wait time, call resolution time, pause between two calls, number of calls per day, etc. This phenomenon is even more pronounced in the “outbound” world, where to avoid any unnecessary latency, call engine technologies have allowed issuing 3, 5, or even 10 calls per agent to ensure that at least one client would respond in person, thereby optimizing the agent's speaking time as much as possible.

Thus, from 1980 onwards, IVR, ACD, CTI, call generators, agent dashboards, skills, priority, queues, etc., have become the technical tools for agent productivity. Immediately, competitive pressure and the policy of the best value have led remote sellers to seek increasingly enhanced optimization of their costs by massively offshoring, outsourcing, and then automating their call centers, which in the meantime became customer relationship centers.

Let's now place ourselves in the year 2000. The internet is slowly suffocating “paper” distance sellers, the advent of smartphones has not yet completely killed our old landlines, but already the web offers new solutions to lighten the burden on customer services: FAQs, self-care, bots, video tutorials, forums, etc. Thus, as e-commerce develops, customers are increasingly called upon to navigate their issues themselves to relieve the customer relationship centers, already pressured by cost constraints and performance objectives.

Here we are in 2021, and the quest for the Zen Screen is still ongoing. However, it seems increasingly evident to us. The stress of agents and the growing dissatisfaction of clients are both tied to the multiplicity of applications necessary to effectively respond to client requests. This multiplicity is now the cause of an average response time of agents to a client call of 2 minutes 30 seconds. Yet, there must exist an elegant solution that, like a three-cushion billiard shot, will resolve this conundrum in a single movement, right ... ?

To be continued in the next episode

Update of the article: December 30, 2021