Cisco Cisco IP Contact Center Release 4.6.1 Livre blanc

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Each of the waves had a clear beginning, but they are ongoing and cumulative in nature (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Three Waves of Customer Care

Wave 1: Cost and Efficiency

This wave began in earnest the 1980s and was focused on the contact center as a place seeking fast, predictable

outcomes and minimal expense per customer interaction. This wave brought focus on continually decreasing costs

while maintaining care standards.

Cost management technologies are exemplified by 800 number (or Freephone) service and the automatic call

distributor (ACD) itself, which has been tuned and optimized over the years by numerous refinements that seek to

gain all possible efficiencies out of each customer interaction. Contact center technology providers that started in

the early days of wave 1 include

“big-iron” appliance vendors that even today tend to focus on reducing the

transactional cost of voice calls into and out of the contact center.

Interactive voice response (IVR) systems were deployed in wave 1 to divert calls from more expensive agent

assistance to lower-cost self-service. Comprehensive reporting and analytics tools were developed to monitor,

analyze, and optimize each phase of the call flow. The primary business processes supported were inquiry, billing,

and sales. Important metrics include Average Speed of Answer (ASA), Average Hold Time (AHT), agent

occupancy, and cost per call.

In more recent years businesses have deployed workforce optimization (WFO) and analytics tools to further reduce

the cost of providing customer service. And of course tremendous savings and efficiencies have been realized by

the ongoing migration of contact centers and telephony from circuit-switched to packet-switched (IP) networks.

Although wave 1 began more than 30 years ago, it continues to this day as businesses and organizations

constantly strive to cut expenses and operating costs. Modern innovations include Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)

Trunking to optimize multimedia routing, contact center as a network or cloud service, and virtualization of the

agent-supervisor workspace.