Act 2: Telephone chairs

The development of fixed-line telecommunications networks from 1950 onwards led to the birth of distance selling and online customer relations. Ordering products from the comfort of one's sofa, with one's favorite online catalog in one hand and the handset in the other, was a value proposition far too strong for consumers not to succumb to. Add to this the development of mass media, radio and television, and advertising quickly established mail order as an essential distribution network.

To welcome all these customers, take orders, manage support and orchestrate call campaigns to increase sales, the need for staff, dedicated spaces and suitable technical infrastructures became essential. Thus was born the era of "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) ;)!

So here we are, as early as 1970, with remote agents, remote platforms and remote communications infrastructures. As soon as the first call centers were created, a fundamental observation was made: it was economically impossible to have as many agents on the line as there were customer calls in progress. Like airports and their racecourses, contact centers were quickly organized to manage this asymmetry, with groups of agents, dedicated departments, queues and call distribution engines, all coupled with IT applications to receive, qualify, route, distribute, record and measure call flows.

This strong economic constraint was immediately followed by performance objectives: maximum customer waiting time, call resolution time, pause between two calls, number of calls per day, etc. This phenomenon is even more marked in the "outbound" world. This phenomenon is even more marked in the "outbound" world, where to avoid unnecessary latency, call engine technologies have enabled 3, 5 or even 10 calls to be made per agent to ensure that at least one customer will answer by voice, thus optimizing agent talk time as much as possible.

Thus, from 1980 onwards, IVRs, ACDs, CTIs, egg-layers, agent headbands, skills, priority, queues, etc., became the technical instruments of agent productivity. Immediately, competitive pressure and the policy of "best value for money" led remote sellers to seek ever greater optimization of their costs, by massively relocating, outsourcing and then automating their call centers, which in the meantime had become customer relations centers.

Let's take a look at the year 2000. The Internet is slowly suffocating "paper" mail-order firms, the arrival of smartphones hasn't yet killed off our old landlines for good, but the web is already offering new solutions to lighten the load on customer services: FAQ, selfcare, bots, video tutorials, forums, etc. So, the more e-commerce develops, the more customers are called upon to do things for themselves, taking the burden off customer relations centers already pressurized by cost constraints and performance targets.

Here we are in 2021, and the quest for the Zen Screen is still ongoing. And yet, it seems increasingly obvious. Agent stress and growing customer dissatisfaction are both linked to the multiplicity of applications needed to respond effectively to customer requests. Today, this multiplicity is the cause of an average agent response time to a customer call of 2 min 30. Yet there must be an elegant solution that, like a three-cushion billiard shot, will solve this squaring problem in a single move, no? ?

More in the next episode

Last update: December 30, 2021