How AT&T gave up the opportunity to build the technology behind the call center
Calling up Verizon or Comcast to set up your home service can sometimes feel like a nauseating process of pulling teeth. And shockingly, that service hasn't been with us for a particularly long time.
In fact, the call center as we know it—the large room of company representatives, talking on the phone, selling a product or offering service to existing customers—came nearly 100 years after the invention of the telephone.
There is, admittedly, some debate as to who had the first call center. Clearly, phone companies, who had armies of operators connecting calls, could arguably be considered customer service representatives in the modern sense, though they weren't considered as such at the time.
And doctors, who had to schedule many appointments via phone, were likely early users of 24-hour answering services, which clearly played direct inspiration to today's customer support lines.
One expert on the subject can pin the existence of call centers as far back as 1965. Jonty Pearce, the founder of the online publication Call Centre Helper, says that's when the Birmingham Press and Mail rolled out such a system.
But one use that can and probably should be seen as a line in the sand for modern customer service is Continental Airlines' purchase of a Rockwell Galaxy Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) in 1973. While Pearce calls Rockwell's claim to be the first company to manufacture such a system to be "good marketing baloney," partly because he found another example of it in the wild prior to the Galaxy's release, the purchase nonetheless highlighted the mainstream potential of the technology.
(FWIW, Pearce suggests that ACDs first appeared in the 1950s, and the first major call centers soon after that.)
Rockwell International, now known as Rockwell Automation, was a somewhat unusual firm to take this on—it was known largely for its interest in aerospace and heavy industry, and wasn't previously known for its record in the telephone industry.
But two things happened that gave Rockwell an inside line to building the backbone of the first high-profile call-center. First, the firm acquired Collins Radio Company in 1971, and Continental was already working with Collins on setting up a navigation system, meaning Rockwell had an existing partnership to leverage. But the second factor is perhaps the most curious: AT&T had just rebuffed a request from Continental to build call-center technology itself.
According to a 2007 Los Angeles Times article, AT&T told the airline it would take eight years to build the technology needed to automate the routing of a phone call—a timeframe that suggests, considering AT&T's size, that it was near the bottom of the priority list.
So Continental went with Rockwell, where an engineer named Robert Hirvela did most of the dirty work and received the patent for it. The system worked so well that Continental used it for 23 years, and when they replaced it, they used another Rockwell system.
(That won't happen again, by the way: Neither Continental Airlines nor Rockwell's automated telephone business exist in the form they did in the '90s. After a number of mergers, the call-center business now exists as a firm called Aspect.)
While Pearce emphasizes that Rockwell's ACD wasn't first, he does say that they played an important role in popularizing it—and that the ACD helped change the world.
"The invention of ACD technology made the concept of a call centre possible," Pearce noted in his blog post. "Essentially it replaced the human operator with a far more flexible automated system capable of handling much greater numbers of calls."
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