Call centers...18 years of progress

Call Center Solutions, Jul 1999 by Tehrani, Nadji

A Chicken in every pot; a computer in every home ... and I say, a cutting-edge call center in every company that Intends to stay ahead of the competition and remain in business.

This 18th-year anniversary issue gives me a great opportunity to look back on our history as well as forward to our future. Since June 1982, when this publication was launched as Telemarketing' magazine, our great call center industry has witnessed a tremendous amount of growth, change and evolution. At that time, the call center industry as we know it today literally did not exist, except for a handful of companies that were either conducting market research or handling customer service and fulfillment by phone, along with a very small number of companies doing sales support and lead prequalification by phone. As such, Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC') is proud to have been instrumental in the development of the call center industry. We are equally proud to own the registered trademark for the name Telemarketing'.

A Pioneering Effort

Given that there was no telemarketing industry to speak of in 1982, you may wonder what drove me to launch a trade publication called Telemarketing. The answer is simple: through my firsthand experience I learned that telemarketing worked and could be of tremendous benefit to all businesses. Here's how:

Back in the late '70s, TMC(TM) published trade magazines for the chemical coatings industry. One day I became disenchanted with the progress of our advertising sales representatives who were traveling around the country selling face-toface. That day, I decided to pick up the phone just to see what I could do selling ads by phone. That was the beginning of the foundation of the telemarketing industry in my mind. In just one hour, I was able to sell five full ad pages, which was as much as my top field sales representatives sold in a week. I repeated the process for four more days and by the end of the week, I had sold 20 ad pages without incurring any costs for car allowances, expense accounts, hotel and lodging, food, cabs, parking or airline tickets. I was so excited - I had discovered a gold mine, a way to produce far more sales in the shortest possible time at a fraction of the cost. My vision led me to call this new publication "Telemarketing ... The Magazine of Electronic Marketing and Communications" (see photo to the left). Incidentally, today we call the cutting-edge method of conducting business: electronic commerce; e-commerce; electronic marketing; e-business, etc., so our subtitle wasn't too far off the mark. But back then, we knew we had a rough road ahead. Here we had a fledgling, barely existing industry and no idea where the next article would come from. As an entrepreneur who normally does not think beyond tomorrow, we took the plunge and launched Telemarketing magazine. And ... sure enough, after the second issue, Linda Driscoll, our esteemed editor (whom, by the way, we are proud to say continues to serve Technology Marketing Corporation as vice president and editorial director of C@LL CENTER Solutions' magazine), came to me and informed me, "Mr. Tehrani, I am sorry, but we have nothing more to write about." In search of finding something new to write about, my investigation took me to the offices of Mr. John Wyman, vice president of Marketing at AT&T at that time, to ask him for his assistance. He agreed to assist us under one condition, and that was that we must maintain the editorial integrity of this publication. Those of you who have been subscribers since 1982 will hopefully agree that it is precisely what we have done, especially as the quantity of editorial with great substance began to increase in the ensuing years.

Technological Evolution And The Dawn Of A New Era

It has been amazing and thrilling to watch the technological development of our industry by being in a position where we have been among the first to learn of every new breakthrough. We have seen the use of 3x5 cards and rotary telephones evolve to push-button telephones to integrated contact management software and automated dialing to Web-enabled call centers. Perhaps the latest evolution in the call center began in the mid '90s with the introduction of the universal agent concept and the technologies that enable TSRs and CSRs to conduct inbound and outbound calls with equal efficiency. Then came the necessity for greater customer service, customer retention and what is now known as CRM or customer relationship management - none of which would have reached such extraordinary heights without the appropriate use of cutting-edge technology such as CTI and Internet telephony. These powerful technologies uniquely lend themselves to far greater customer service and efficiency. They also offer significantly enhanced value, operability and multifunctionality in the call center. And today, with technologies that integrate the call center with the Internet, as well as the latest networking technologies, we can interact with customers in ways never before dreamed possible.