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Filed under Call Centre Life , Automatic Call Distributor, history
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I was recently asked by a researcher for the BBC, for an upcoming documentary on
contact centres, for the date of the first call centre in the UK.
This question stumped me. I knew of some early ones, but what was the first? I
have done some research and the early results are quite surprising.
The creation myth
Like many revolutionary technologies, the call centre has a creation myth. This
states that call centres as we know them today originate from the Automatic Call
The earliest example of a call centre we can find in the UK is at the The Birmingham
installed in 1965, as seen in the photos. Thanks to the British Telephones website
for allowing us to reproduce them.
Already the hallmarks of the call centre can be seen in the rows of agents with
individual phone terminals, taking and making calls.
The Ericsson PABX ET 4 was a fully automatic Strowger Telephone system with a
cordless operators console. It superseded the PABX No. 3 and was manufactured
by Ericsson Telephones of Beeston, Notts. The ACD system was an adaptation of
this PABX ET 4 system.
Early adopters
By the early 1970s PABX systems were beginning to include ACD technology,
allowing the development of large-scale call centres.
In May 1972, the New Scientist magazine reported that Barclaycard had installed a
Plessey PABX at its Northampton processing centre. This included an ACD to allow
up to 72 enquiries to be dealt in cyclic order. The agents on this system were able to
check the credit card records of Barclaycards 1.6 million customers via a microfiche
reference system.
At the same time, Barclaycards competitors Access installed a computerised system
allowing very fast access to customer records. It was an indication of the future
direction of contact centres.
In 1972 Gas World reported the installation of an ACD system at British Gas in
Wales. The system had the capacity to handle up to 20,000 calls per week. This
may have been the first multilingual system as it handled both Welsh and English
calls. It was reported that Welsh-speaking customers in Aberystwyth at first found it
strange to be telling someone in Wrexham of their problems.
Big names enter the market
Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s technological advances consolidated the
importance of call centres to business. Many of todays big names established
themselves in the UK during this period.
Datapoint began working with TSB Phonebank (now Lloyds TSB). [Does anyone
know the date when TSB Phonebank started ?]
Aspects flagship product was the Aspect CallCenter, somewhat fittingly, as the
company went on to become one of the worlds largest manufacturer of dedicated
ACDs.
Aspect entered the UK market in 1989, with Microsoft as their first customer. The
deregulation of the UK telecoms industry led to a drop in service costs, and as a
result the UK contact centre industry became larger than in any other country except
the USA.
ACDs systems fuelled innovation, such as the launch of First Direct in 1989. First
Direct was the UKs first direct-banking company, and proclaimed itself the future of
banking with an unusual television advert made to seem as if it was being broadcast
from 2010.
The advert can be viewed here.
When the term call centre was created
The OED lists the earliest published use of the term call centre as being as recent
as 1983, in Data Communications, in this sentence:
Each of these *call centers is staffed with agents who work with Honeywell
intelligent terminals, enabling them to quote rates and compute discounts given to
large users.
Dot com mania
In the 1990s the call centre industry continued to grow, spurred on by the rise of the
internet. From 1995 onwards internet-based dot com companies attracted vast
amounts of investment from venture capitalists excited by the potential for rapid
growth offered by the online economy.
As websites became the central point of contact and sales for an increasing number
of companies, call centres were essential in dealing with customer service and
technical support. Unfortunately it didnt last, and by 2001 the dot com crash saw
many internet-based companies go bust.
English spoken by overseas agents. Companies with large offshore call centres
attracted negative media coverage for taking jobs away from the UK.
Over the last three years some companies have actively advertised the fact that their
call centres are in the UK. NatWest launched an advertising campaign in 2007 based
around guaranteeing that customers would speak to agents in the UK rather than
overseas. Some companies have also moved customer service operations back to
the UK.
The call centre has now been an invaluable business facility for three decades. With
the recent rise of social media and technology that may allow call centres to become
virtual networks of homeworkers linked by cloud computing, it appears customer
service is swiftly evolving.
Call centres are a vitally important source of jobs. As Call Centre Helper reported
recently, new figures from ContactBabel show that more than one million people are
now employed by contact centres in the UK.
Our history of the call centre is far from complete, and wed like to include your
knowledge. If you have any memories, information or stories about call centre
history, drop us a line.
Many thanks to all of the people who have helped to contribute so far to this article,
including Derek Massey, Phil Wright, Dirk Speas, Steve Morell and to Bob
Freshwater from the British Telephones website.
19 Jan 2011 - Filed under Call Centre Life , Automatic Call Distributor, history
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Last chance to name the most respected people in the call centre community?
You may be inteerested that Girobank established its Telebank call centre in its
centralised Head office in Bootle Merseyside in 1979.
Posted by Tony Blythe 20 Jan @ 3:08 pm
Hi Tony Thanks for that pointer. It would be great if anyone else has any information
on it. For example does anyone know what ACD system they used?
Posted by jonty pearce 20 Jan @ 4:11 pm
Great piece of research Jonty. A mention should also go to:
1) Command & control phone systems which were being used way back in the
emergency services call centres.
2) Dealing systems in the City which performed a similar function to ACDs but within
a dealing room. These handled many private circuits as well as simple phone calls.
3) The humble key & lamp phone system which I imagine was many peoples
introduction to small ad hoc call centre working.
The factor these systems shared with ACDs was that they had with more lines than
positions and they had control functions beyond the humble phone dial. Phone
systems or PBXs had more extensions than lines and people had an ordinary
phone.
I still have my training manuals from 1980 if your desperate for more !
The other significant industry stage was around 1995/6 when a lot of companies
started implementing pan-european, multi-lingual call centres, with Dublin and
Amsterdam doing particularly well.
To your question: I think TSB PhoneBank was slightly later as I remember Paul
Swainbank giving talks when we started doing the first call centre conferences in
1994 through Aspen which was my 2nd company. We focused on call centres after
helping build 2 large call centres for HP in 1992 and then C&W in 1993 the latter
still in operation in Wythenshawe. I keep meeting great people who worked at that
site in the mid 90s.
A historical mention for 3 people. First should go to Jeanette Menday who spoke at
our first call centre conference in 1993 and came from one of the US Airlines with
Fran Brookes (now Fish) to start Call Centre Focus in 1994, the first publication for
the emerging industry. She and I started what is now the European Contact centre
awards circa 1995 Halifax Direct won if I remember correctly.
Secondly, during those early conferences there was an influential guy called John
McCann from Glasgow Development Agency. He went from knowing nothing to
knowing more than most by attending all the conferences there were. Hes the
reason Glasgow has so many call centres. When we started Aspen Scotland we had
a launch conference which John helped with and he pushed for the various parties to
form a user association which Ann Marie Forsyth, who was a speaker, went on to
chair.
Thirdly, Leiderman and Roncoroni was the earliest call centre consultancy going
back into the 1980s I believe and of course Simon Roncoroni is still in the industry.
There were many ex BT people who came through their hands into consulting and
management.
As well as Aspen, the other two centres of excellent people in the mid 90s were
Merchants and Decisions. We sold Aspen to TSC, Merchants sold to Dimension
Data and Decisions sold to Sitel. You can see this lineage in many contact centre
experts CVs.
Posted by Peter Massey 20 Jan @ 9:27 pm
Hi I worked for Yellow Pages from 1976 in what was then quite a pioneering telesales operation selling advertising into the various classifications brilliant job,
excellent money and great atmosphere in the office with like-minded colleagues who
were aiming high to sell new and renewal ads. to business. Enabled me to buy a
house just before age 21, so grateful for that!
It was a compulsory working practice for all customer service reps to disinfect their
headsets and desks every morning prior to starting work with diluted Dettol I can
still smell it now. We were seated in banks of 4 staff with one Senior allocated to
each bank and a Glaswegian Tele Sales Manager who ruled with a rod of iron, but
was highly motivational, dynamic and fair she was brilliant. Her boss was another
Glaswegian who knew each of us well and dished out praise and criticism with no
holds barred. Promotion was lightning fast but was so was the door if you didnt
perform, only as good as yesterdays results was the mantra. Yellow Pages
employed hundreds of staff and each year, there was a massive central Sales Rally
to which sales staff from all the offices across the UK were transported the
presentations were super-slick and again, highly motivational, but maybe a bit corny
by todays standards they worked though. Turnover was high people were
chewed up and spat back out if they did not hit sales target consistently. Training
was continuous and delivered to a superb standard, usually from the HQ in
Farnborough. Two weeks residential induction training was mandatory for all,
followed by further residential courses as you progressed up the ladder. I wouldnt
have missed it for the world and this experience set me up for life, both with lifeskills
and financially it was grand and was headhunted when it split into Thomson
Directories and Yellow Pages, so the fun continued until my children needed me
more!
Posted by Sally Brown 20 Jan @ 10:45 pm
I worked in a call centre which did not belong to the business we were taking calls
for. Our company focused more than keeping its contract with zero customer service,
I left. If the compqany had employed us directly we would hve been paid more
paradoxically the company would have paid less for our services as a result. The
customer service would have been brilliant and there wold have been lower turnover
of staff. Their Indian call centre was appalling.
Posted by Farina Foxley 25 Jan @ 11:47 pm
Datapoint implemented the first ACD for TSB Phonebank in 1979.
Today, we are seeing that many companies are now looking to collaborate across
multiple channels by integrating social media, webchat and SMS in to the contact
centre as customers demand more routes to interact with businesses.
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