It has been 100 months since the final issue of Inbound/Outbound came out. At the time, it was dubbed a collector's edition because it focused on call centers in the collections industry.
More than eight years later, we would like to present you with another collector's edition. In this article, which we specially created for the 100th issue, we collected 100 of the most intriguing inventions, events and developments ever to occur in call centers.
Like the call centers we cover, this article is a collaborative effort. We would like to thank all the experts in the call center industry who contributed to this collection, including Call Center Magazine's first editor, Madeline Bodin, Response Design associate Kathryn Jackson, Telephony@Work COO and Former CMP Media show director Ed Margulies and Call Center Magazine's founder Harry Newton. We would especially like to thank ICCM president Brad Cleveland for contributing so many historical items.
You'll notice that aside from the beginning of this collection, we didn't list the items in this article in any particular order. There's a reason for this. Clearly, call centers could not have existed without the invention of the telephone, but the way call centers became part of our culture was not an orderly process. Many factors contributed to the evolution of call centers, including a legal decision nearly a century after the invention of the phone that enabled companies to install their own phone switches. The ongoing development of call centers, like the call volumes that they face, isn't necessarily something that one can plan for. Call centers are unpredictable; that's what makes them challenging and fun. It is in the spirit of fun that we present our collection to you.
Now if you're wondering how we came up with the title, we'd like to point out that the word "cool" spelled backwards is "100C." Given that this is the 100th issue, that "C" is the Roman numeral for 100 and that both words in the phrase "call center" start with "c," we felt that the word "cool" most aptly described what this article is about. We hope that you, too, find this eclectic collection to be cool, funky and fun.
1: Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876. The first complete sentence to be transmitted electronically was, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you!" (History reports that Bell had just spilled acid on himself, and some people speculate whether those were his exact words.) Alexander Graham Bell objected to "Hello," as the greeting, instead preferring "hoy, hoy." If he could only see just how many hellos - and bonjours, guten tags and holas his invention has spawned and witness the extent to which the telephone has shaped our lives, more than a century after patent 174,465 was issued.
2: Bell offered to sell his new device to telegraph giant Western Union, then the largest communications company in the U.S., for $100,000. The company declined, stating in an internal memo that, "This telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." Western Electric would eventually become part of AT&T, as would the Bell operating companies, thereby creating the Bell System.
3: Phone got your tongue? It might have, if it had been invented by someone else. Samuel F.B. Morse invented the telegraph in 1837, and by the middle of the 1800s, there was speculation that conversations could also be transmitted by wire. In 1854, an English newspaper described how the system could work: "A plate of silver and one of zinc are taken into the mouth, one above, the other below the tongue. They are then placed in contact with the wire, and words issuing from the mouth are conveyed by the wire." (And to think that today, we complain about uncomfortable headsets!)
4: Almon B. Strowger, credited with inventing the automatic switch, set up the Strowger Automatic Electric Company in Chicago in 1891. The first commercial switchboard, based on Strowger's patent, opened in LaPorte, IN, in 1892. The Bell Company licensed Strowger's service, and in subsequent decades the automated switchboard would replace operated-assisted switchboards at telephone companies, enabling callers to directly dial numbers without assistance. Strowger said he invented the device be cause he wanted a "girlless, cussless" means of getting calls through to his business.
5: The first agents were inadvertently appointed in the 1920s when organizations began to put phones on the desks of people whose main means of dealing with customers had been through correspondence or face-to-face contact. Eventually, the association of customer service with the telephone became so strong that the advertising phrase, "our operators are standing by," was born.
6: AT&T developed the toll-free 800 service in 1967 that reversed charges from callers to the company they were calling. As a society, we eventually learned to love 800 numbers so much that we ran out of them, and had to move on to 888, 887 and, most likely, more toll-free numbers will follow.
7: Arguably the legislation that has had the greatest impact on the call center industry is the 1968 Carterfone decision by the FCC. The ruling allowed equipment made by businesses other than the Bell System to be connected to the public telephone system and it enforced the right of companies to hook up their own gear to the public telephone network (so long as this equipment did no harm to the network). The decision derived its name from a device called the Carterfone, invented by Thomas Carter. The device consisted of a transceiver equipped with an acoustic coupler into which a regular phone handset was placed. By eliminating the Bell System's monopoly over the manufacturing of phone switches, the decision spawned the interconnect industry, leading to developments such as the modern PBX, IVR system and ACD.
8: Urged on by "Phone Power" pamphlets from AT&T during the late 1960s, many companies began to see opportunities to reduce or eliminate field offices and field representatives by taking advantage of the newly introduced 800 service. Although these new telephone operators were performing the functions of in-person representatives paid much more, their pay was tied to clerical schedules - a precedent that many call center managers still struggle to eliminate today.
9: Companies have spent millions promoting their "vanity" numbers, such as 1-800-MET-LIFE, 1-800 FLOWERS and 1-800 USA-RAIL. Some of these numbers are genuinely endearing, such as 1-800 LITTLE-1 (The RightStart catalog), 1-800 YOCASIO, and 1-800 LOVEBOAT (Princess Cruises). If only it weren't so darn hard to find those digits on the keypad.
10: Can you spell "operator"? If you can't, you're not alone but you may not have called the phone company you thought you did. When MCI came out with 1-800-COLLECT, a service that offered reduced rates on collect calls, AT&T matched with 1-800-OPERATOR. AT&T learned, to its chagrin, that up to 20% of callers misspelled "operator" as they were dialing the number. Even worse, the most common misspelling, "o-p-e-r-a-t-e-r" was an MCI 800 number at the time.
