When you contact your bank, mortgage company, or the customer service organization of that product you bought but are having difficulty with, is it a pleasant experience? Being a salesman the past 40 years, the last 20 selling technology in the contact center space, I thought I would summarize some of the evolution of this business segment that most people love to hate.

It used to be when you called an organization, a person would answer the phone and you would explain your issue or the information you desired and the person with whom you spoke would either provide you an answer or would call you back. That’s assuming, the organization had a customer service department. Many didn’t. As an example, If you wanted  information regarding your bank account, you went into the branch.

Much of this began to change after the deregulation in the telephone industry almost 30 years ago. That led to the evolution of the telecommunication industry. Up until then, businesses like individuals received all their telephone services directly from the phone company. If an organization added a phone, they obtained it and another line from the phone company. The telecommunications manager was simply the person that ordered the phones.

One of the first technologies to emerge in the customer service space was Interactive Voice Response (IVR). In my next posting I’ll discuss the evolution of IVR, which, although disliked by many, is an extremely useful solution to obtain information and can actually be user friendly if properly designed.