Evolution of the contact center

Alright, hello everybody, welcome to the next lesson, which is the evolution of the contact center. And I love the evolution, because this is all about history and who doesn't love history? It is important because it is nice to understand where we came from and where we're going. So, we are going to jump in our time machine.

We are going to go back to this date and time, called 1876. Now, that date is important because a gentleman by the name of Alexander Graham Bell created what we all know and love - the telephone.

So, the telephone. Huge invention. It's a new way to connect people to each other in areas that we probably couldn't get connected to before then. So, in order to connect these people, we had to come up with something that industry jargon calls the PBX, or public branch exchange. What is that? Okay, well, picture those old black-and-white photos of all those operators plugging in and plugging out those different cords and wires from all over the place. That's how they actually connected people, and that was a workout, so that's where we started connecting people.

Fast forward a good amount of time and we're in 1957. Lots of stuff has been done. Lots of infrastructure laid, lots of telephone wires, and just - people are starting to get good at this, and so businesses start eyeing this, and understand that 'Hey, we have an opportunity here.' So, in 1957 this company by the name of Dial America became the first call center ever. And what was their main purpose and mission? Well, it was to get you to sign up for a subscription to Life magazine. That's right.

Now, because of that, volumes increased. People are really starting to figure out how to use phones to their advantage. And as you can imagine, all those operators we talked about, well, their arms are getting tired.

So then, somebody invented in the 1960s, something called the public automated branch exchange PBX. So - public automated branch exchange. And as you can imagine, that was an automated fashion that could then replace those operators from manually plugging and playing, and it could do it. And why is that important? Well, it's the first introduction to technology inside the phone world.

And so, if we fast-forward a few more years, we get into the 1970s, and now these calls are really starting to come in and they said, 'Well, how can we get more efficient with this?' So, at that point somebody invented the interactive voice response system. Or, as we say, IVR. And once the IVR was created, it was a way for them to triage calls on the front end and start routing them to the right place inside an enterprise. That was a big step.

Now fast forward. We take that evolution and we are in the 1980s now. Now the '80s was the heyday of the call center, and in fact it was such an important decade for the call center that it actually got its first ever documented name, "the call center." And so there we are in the '80s, [and] they start popping up like wildfire all over the place. We have inshore, we have offshore. We have in-house contact centers. Things are looking good.

So, continue down the evolution path and we land in the 1990s. Now the '90s is really important inside this industry because this is where people really started getting strategic on how they were going to go about using and leveraging call centers. So, in the '90s, call centers - that was front facing. They wanted to get rid of face-to-face as much as they could because bricks and mortar are expensive. They want to redirect traffic, so they said 'Hey, have somebody pick up the phone. Call us. We'll take care of it. It's going to be fantastic.'

Well, that was great for a while, but then they realized that at an average cost of anywhere from 7 to 10 dollars per phone call, it got really expensive. So that brought in the new decade of evolution, which is the 2000s. And this is where we have the channel migration, where companies started looking at different ways of cost containment, or call containment strategies. How can we condense this? How can we spread it out? How can we get people to service on their own, rather than calling us? Because it's really, really expensive, so that's where the mindset started going. So, they started broadening channel access out there.

Then the 2010s came, and people started going to multi-channel, and so that was a further evolution, [and] as new technologies emerged they started figuring out ways to incorporate them inside the contact center. At this point, the term contact center started coming about regularly, because now things were going through web self-service. Things were starting to go through chat. We saw things going through e-mail. We saw it going through the 'phone. So, really, you know, we start to see this, this whole new concept of the contact center.

2016 to 2018 really focused on that omni channel, right? These were the people who were tired of calling into a contact center, explaining the situation, getting transferred, and somebody had no idea why they were getting transferred to them and they had to start that conversation all over again. So how can we get smarter with this? How can we take somebody, take them from one channel, place them in the other channel? Help bring that all together?

I think you guys know a company that can help with that, by the way, and that's really where we started with omni channel. That's where it started coming. But as we started progressing into 2016 and into the 2020s here, what people are really looking at is: 'Okay, that's great, we can get them across channels, but really, the key here to customer satisfaction is hyper personalization. How do we get them so enamored with our service, they don't want to go anywhere else?' And so that's where we start adding in that really heavy artificial intelligence. The end-to-end robotic process automation, as we say here in Pega. How do we use customer service? How do we use the muscle in the brain? How do we bring that all together to evolve, to really create a unique and personalized experience for each and every one, because one-size-fits-all customer service - nobody likes that. Everybody likes to feel special, right?

And then, as we continue to evolve, you're going to see other things like autonomous customer service coming about, and you're going to see all sorts of emerging technologies and it's really exciting. So, you guys are at an incredible point right now, you're at a great spot to further this on and be part of that evolution of the contact center.

So, folks, I hope you enjoyed that. It was high level, it was brief, but now you know when we started, and where we're headed.

Thanks, and happy selling!

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