What a call center is
A call center is a workplace where many agents answer or place telephone calls on behalf of an organization, supported by equipment that routes each call to a free agent. Customers see the result as a phone number that always seems to be answered by someone, whichever person happens to be free. The business model is simple, but it depends on several technologies working together, each of which has its own history.
Ancestors: answering services and switchboards
The idea of a group of people handling calls for other organizations is older than the term. From the early twentieth century, telephone answering services employed operators at switchboards to take calls and messages for doctors, tradespeople and small firms. Department stores and mail-order companies also had rooms of staff to take telephone orders. Large companies such as airlines used reservation offices staffed by many agents.
These were call centers in function, but the work was managed in a hand-crafted way. A supervisor allocated calls, and staff could be overloaded or idle without anyone having a clear picture.
Automatic call distribution
The central technology is automatic call distribution, or ACD. An ACD system receives incoming calls and sends each to the agent who has been free the longest, or to an agent with a particular skill. If all agents are busy, it holds the call in a queue. Early forms of automatic distribution were built into private branch exchanges in the 1960s. A product often cited as an early dedicated ACD was a system developed in the early 1970s and installed for an airline reservation operation, though accounts differ about the details and the claim to be first.
ACD systems also generated reports: how many calls arrived, how long callers waited, how many hung up, how long each agent talked. These statistics allowed managers to plan staffing in ways that were not possible before, drawing on the mathematics of queues first developed for telephone exchanges.
Toll-free numbers
Another ingredient was the toll-free number. In 1967 AT&T introduced a service in the United States that allowed callers to dial numbers beginning with 800 free of charge, with the cost billed to the receiver. For businesses, this removed the cost barrier for customers who wanted to order, ask or complain. Combined with catalog sales, airline reservations and later credit card orders, toll-free numbers created a large stream of inbound calls that needed centralized handling.
Other countries introduced similar free-call services over the following years, with different number ranges.
The first modern centers
A commonly mentioned early example of a modern call center is a newspaper’s telephone sales operation in Birmingham, England, in the 1960s, where a group of agents handled advertising calls using a specially designed system. As with other claims of “the first,” the evidence is a mix of company history and later retellings, and it should be treated with caution.
What is clearer is that by the 1970s and 1980s, call centers had become a recognized type of workplace in North America and Europe, serving airlines, banks, insurance firms, retailers and technology companies.
Computers join the telephone
In the 1980s and 1990s, computers and telephones began working together, in a field called computer telephony integration. When a call arrived, the system could identify the caller’s number, look up the customer’s record, and display it on the agent’s screen before the call was answered. This “screen pop” saved time and reduced the need to ask for details.
Banks used a similar approach of self-service, with automated teller machines for cash and telephone menus for balances. Interactive voice response systems added menus that let callers choose options by pressing keys or, later, speaking. These handled simple tasks such as checking an account balance, and routed more complex ones to agents. Callers experienced waiting in a queue, listening to recorded announcements or music, a design choice that has become a familiar annoyance.
Offshoring and outsourcing
Falling international telephone costs and better networks made it practical to place centers in countries with lower labor costs and large English-speaking workforces. From the 1990s, countries such as India and the Philippines became major locations for customer-service work serving clients abroad. Outsourcing firms also grew, running centers on behalf of many businesses. Debates continue about quality, working conditions and the effect on jobs in different countries.
The work
Agents typically wear headsets and follow scripts, with performance measures such as average call time, resolution rates and customer ratings. Calls may be monitored and recorded for training. The work is often described as demanding and repetitive, with high turnover in many places, though pay and conditions vary widely. Technology has been used to try to ease the load, for example by providing suggested answers on screen.
From call center to contact center
As customers began to use email, web chat and social media, many call centers became contact centers handling several channels. Voice calls carried over the internet reduced hardware costs and allowed agents to work from home, and cloud computing let companies rent centers instead of building them. Automated assistants using artificial intelligence, and voice assistants, now handle some simple requests. Even so, many organizations still rely on trained agents for complex or sensitive problems, and the basic structure of a team supported by routing technology remains.