The development of fixed telecommunications networks from 1950 led to the emergence of distance commerce and online customer relationship management. Ordering products from the comfort of one's couch, with a favorite online sales catalog in one hand and the phone in the other, was a compelling value proposition that consumers quickly embraced. Add to this the rise of mass media, radio, and television, and advertising swiftly established mail-order selling as an essential distribution network.
To accommodate all these customers, handle order placements, manage support, and orchestrate call campaigns to boost sales, the need for personnel, dedicated spaces, and suitable technical infrastructure became apparent. Thus began the era of the 'telephone chairs,' and with it the challenges of FIFO (First In, First Out), LIFO (Last In, First Out), but never FOLI (First Out, Last In) ;)!
By the 1970s, we had call agents, call centers, and telecommunications infrastructures. From the inception of the first call centers, a fundamental observation was made: it is economically infeasible to have as many online agents as there are ongoing customer calls. Contact centers, much like airports and their airplane race tracks, quickly organized to manage this asymmetry with groups of agents, dedicated services, queues, call distribution engines, all coupled with software applications to accommodate, qualify, route, distribute, record, and measure call flow.
This economic constraint immediately led to performance goals: maximum customer wait time, call resolution time, pause between 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 enabled 3, 5, even 10 calls per agent to ensure a minimum of one customer would respond live, thus optimizing agent talk time as much as possible.
Thus, from the 1980s, IVR, ACD, CTI, dialers, agent dashboards, skills, priority, queue, etc., became the technical instruments of agent productivity. Immediately, competitive pressure and the 'best offer' policy prompted remote sellers to seek ever-increasing optimization of their costs by massively relocating, outsourcing, and then automating their call centers, which in the meantime became customer relationship centers.
Fast forward to the year 2000. The internet is slowly suffocating 'paper' mail-order businesses, smartphones haven't yet killed off our old landlines for good, but already the web offers new solutions to ease the burden on customer service departments: FAQs, self-service, bots, video tutorials, forums, etc. Therefore, as e-commerce develops, customers are increasingly called to fend for themselves to relieve customer relationship centers that are already pressured by cost constraints and performance goals.
Now we are in 2021, and the quest for the Zen Screen is still ongoing. Yet, it seems more and more evident to us. The stress of the agents and the increasing dissatisfaction of customers are both linked to the multiplicity of applications needed to respond effectively to customer requests. This multiplicity is currently causing an average agent response time to a customer call of 2 minutes 30 seconds. Yet, there must be an elegant solution, like a three-cushion billiard shot, that will solve this conundrum in one move, right...?
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Article updated: December 30, 2021
