Cisco Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise 8.5(4) 白書
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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.