At that time, the telephone was still the main technology that made it possible for customers to interact with customer support departments. As we have seen, the call center had appeared about 10 years earlier. The next technological improvement that made the call centers more effective is the so-called Interactive Voice Response or IVR. IVR is a pre-recorded phone tree. You know, it’s this tiny voice that asks you to press one for English and two to tell the company to go fuck itself.
At the time, the technology was still pretty buggy and super expensive. It is only later in the 1980s that the technology really started to impact the lives of many customers around the world. In the best and the worst ways.
This technology made it possible to link customers more rapidly with a more expert agent. But the process also made communication with a business feel more robotic and less human focused as you had to go through these long, pre-recorded paths before you could finally talk to a human. I think the Interactive Voice Response is a good example that shows that technology isn’t enough to fix a problem. Indeed, just by adding the technology you might technically fix the problem.
Yes, the response time is shorter; yes, people reach the right person faster. But the problem here isn’t the mathematical or statistical fact. It’s the personal experience. Many of us, when we start the experience with a pre-recorded voice, are already pissed off as we feel treated like machines by robots.
So, even if it technically goes faster, the few seconds that I spend pressing 1, then 3, then 4, feel like long minutes. It’s the perceived experience that matters in the end (as we will see later with the guys who created SERVQUAL). So, yes, technology has a big impact on the development of customer satisfaction, but let’s not see this history through a technological eye that is too optimistic.
Going further
This article is part of the book "A Tiny History of Service Design, " a tiny two-hour read that goes through the historical events that created what Service Design is today.