Alex Blyth takes a look at how call centre technology has evolved to where we are today.

Once upon a time call centre agents simply took calls and they made calls - nothing more, nothing less. It was a fairly straightforward transaction, but it was limited and could be frustrating for customers and agents alike.

Over time, new communications technologies were introduced to the call centre. First there was automatic call distribution, then data integration, Voice over IP (VoIP), and then most recently the multimedia revolution of e-mail, SMS, instant messaging and social media. Gradually over time the call centre became a contact centre.

Major changes such as these never occur in isolation.

There is always a good reason and each of these stages in the evolution of the call centre either dealt with problems inherent in the previous iteration or took advantage of new technologies that were emerging at the time. None has been perfect however. Each new stage, while it may have been an improvement on what went before, also brought with it new problems and difficulties.

The latest trend in call centre technology is towards unified communications, and some are even bold enough to claim that with this latest development all the problems of the past can be resolved. They argue that by bringing together disparate communications technologies in one easy-to-use interface, the contact centre will finally provide the service for customers, and the workplace for agents, that many have dreamt of for a very long time indeed.

Not everyone is convinced, and it is worth bearing in mind that despite all these industry-wide advances in communications technology, many call centres remain very straightforward telephone operations. According to ContactBabel’s 2009 UK Contact Centre Decision-Makers’ Guide, 77.2 per cent of UK inbound customer contacts are still by phone compared with 9.8 per cent by email, 8.0 per cent by self-service, 2.3 per cent by letter and 1.6 per cent by fax. And despite the massive media focus on new digital media, only 0.3 per cent of inbound customer contacts are by SMS and only 0.1 per cent by text chat.

Progress is not always a smooth transition and it is not always welcome. However, over the years there have been significant beneficial developments. Here, then, are the six main stages in the evolution of call centre communications technology.

Phone In the very early days, the call centre was just the customer service department. In the latter half of the last century, companies shifted from responding to customer enquiries by letter or in person to doing it by telephone. It sped up interactions and meant that companies no longer had to be in the same town as its customers. It was a slow and primitive process though, usually involving paper records and agents with limited understanding of their products and customers.

Automatic call distribution “There is some disagreement about the precise beginnings of the modern call centre,” says Dave Paulding, regional sales director EMEA at Interactive Intelligence. “But it was in the mid-1970s that automatic call distribution (ACD) technology emerged, with Rockwell’s system for a major US airline probably the pioneer in this area.”

Essentially, the ACD added a queuing and call distribution system to the telephone exchange, allowing companies to queue up calls and, for the first time, design call routing plans against each agent group’s skill set. This resulted in increased agent productivity, as well as companies being able to take a vast amount of calls that would otherwise have been dropped.

John Wood, sales and marketing director at C3, a multimedia communications provider, which supplies call centre services to Mind, British Heart Foundation and Terrance Higgins Trust, says: “At this stage the call centre was a large centralised building that provided the live answering services for an often geographically dispersed organisation.”

The technology was straightforward and, in many cases, was simply wheeled in and connected. Aside from the initial configuration, and the need for agents to get used to the queuing system, there were no real technical challenges.
It also brought many benefits, as Wood explains: “For the first time, reports covering all the centralised customer interactions could be noted. Initially there were great savings and some companies like Direct Line Insurance were able to make a name for themselves by passing on these savings to their customers. However, the main drawback was that the emphasis was on volume of transactions not the quality of the experience.”

VoIP

By the early 2000s, the Internet was revolutionising the world, and the call centre industry was no exception. Providing agents with online access gave them a vast new resource with which to answer customers’ queries, and, where companies built online information libraries, it overcame many of the problems that had arisen with CTI. However, it was with Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony that the Internet really began to affect the call centre.

Richer explains: “VoIP is now becoming a well-established tool within call centre operations and its introduction marked a major landmark for the call centre industry. For the first time, call centres could be fully integrated into the overall IT and communications network infrastructure and IT strategy of an organisation. As a result, all areas of the business could work more effectively. Voice and data working off the same network also brought IT efficiency gains to many organisations.”

He adds: “The introduction of VoIP pushed the evolution of communications in the call centre forward. The inclusion of voice and data on a single network meant that it became crucial for companies to test and monitor their network infrastructure. Offering VoIP means that a company has to ensure voice quality. Testing and monitoring solutions identifies the issues that occur when too much data is running across a network, including problems in voice quality, which can be damaging in terms of customer satisfaction.”

Multimedia

By 2004 the world had realised that the Internet was more than just a vast source of information; it was also a radically new way for us to communicate with each other. Ten years ago, we still arranged our business and social lives with phone calls; now it is all done via e-mails, text messages, instant messages or posts on social media platforms. The contact centre has evolved again to incorporate this revolution in communication techniques.
This has brought many benefits. Philip Shuldham-Legh, group sales and marketing director at contact centre, The Listening Company comments: “Contact centres that blend voice and non-voice activities are quite common today and have been for probably five years. There is no doubt that these blended environments can offer variety for the agents, cost savings for the company, and greater levels of satisfaction for the customer.”

However, there are still many problems. The first is that consumers now expect to be able to make contact with companies in any media they want and they will still demand a really rapid response as well.

As Craig Pumfrey, director of marketing and communications at quality monitoring company NICE Systems EMEA, says: “Initially inbound e-mail volumes were low and a response time of 24 hours was generally accepted. Today however we are much more aware of our power as a customer and will typically not wait much longer than an hour or two before looking for either an alternative channel or organisation to deal with. In fact ask someone from generation Y, the group that is growing up with instant messaging and they will tell you that they wouldn’t bother trying to contact someone, if they didn’t already know they were there.”

Secondly, while multimedia has brought greater variety to agents’ working lives, it has also required them to have the skills to cope with that variety. Jurgen Hekkink, product marketing manager at communications technology provider Kcom, says: “Not every agent is capable of managing both voice-based and text-based contact with customers. Contact centre managers need to adapt their recruitment and training programmes to cope with these new demands on their staff.”

Finally, the introduction of multimedia has presented significant reporting challenges for agents and their managers.

Interactions with customers occur by phone, e-mail, text message, instant message as well as on Facebook, Twitter, and in dozens of other places. We have come a long way from the controlled environment of ACD. In the past few years, agents have struggled to get a single view of customer activity and their managers have struggled to get one of agent activity.

Unified communications

The latest stage in the evolution of contact centre communications technology is the much-vaunted unified communications. This involves putting all interactions on one interface which agents can access from anywhere. As Cath Knight, marketing manager at unifi ed communications provider Mitel, says: “Multimedia contact centres gave customers the choice of how and where to contact companies; unified communications gives agents the choice of how and where to respond.”

She continues: “This means that the contact centre no longer needs to be a large building full of agents. Increasingly agents work from home, meaning a better work-life balance for them, reduced dependence on labour availability in a given location, and a marked reduction in carbon footprint as there is less commuting involved in this situation.”

Despite the benefits in terms of enhanced customer service that the single, multimedia interface promises, contact centres have been slow to incorporate unified communications. The technical implementation is straightforward and the potential benefits are clear, so Knight believes that the stumbling block is that contact centre managers like to see their staff working hard, and that many agents actually like the company of their colleagues in the office.

It is important that the industry finds some way to resolve these concerns and to take the next step forward in its evolution. With no immediate end in sight to the stagnation that has gripped the global economy over the past two years, contact centre budgets are going to come under increasing pressure and there will be an increasing call for contact centres to deliver more for less. Unified communications could provide that solution.

Aspect was the company that lays claim to a number of firsts including intelligent ACD in 1973, automated dialling in 1981 and Internet callback technology in 1995. The firm’s Senior VP, Europe and Africa Mark King adds finally, “By bringing together multiple capabilities in a single platform, unified solutions give contact centres the necessary control, flexibility, and freedom to focus on cost-effectively meeting today’s consumer’s demands. They are making traditional contact centres obsolete.”

Data integration

“The third phase came during the mid-1990s with computer telephony integration (CTI),” says Trevor Richer, marketing director EMEA at IP telephony systems testing company Empirix: “As ACD developed further, organisations wanted to begin to synchronise their communications systems with those used elsewhere in the business.”

He continues: “CTI meant the introduction of simple screen population, or Screen Pop. It became a highly valued tool as it allowed customer data collected from the telephone systems to appear on an agent’s screen before the call was answered, giving them immediate access to all of the customer’s details. It also allowed for voice and data transfers, so wherever the call was rerouted to, the customer data would follow.”

However, this third phase brought more serious technical challenges, as Richer goes on to describe: “This was a step into the relatively unknown for companies. Although a number of different standards were introduced to help the industry transition, they were not fully embraced, leading to problems with integration. There were in addition some unexpected consequences such as agents being asked how they knew the caller’s name when the call was answered. This extended talk times considerably.”

Click here for part 2 of the Call Centre Technology special feature: Alex Blyth dusts off his crystal ball and explains what the call centre of the future will look like