History
One of the things that struck me when I went to the US for further studies in the late 1980s were toll-free numbers. The 1-800 numbers were everywhere. These toll-free numbers were the way brands interacted with customers. You could call almost any brand and speak to a human agent. The enabler for the toll-free call was the concept of the “collect call” or reverse charging. Instead of the calling party paying, it was the called party that bore the cost.
RingCentral has the early story on toll-free numbers: “The 1-800 number got its start in 1967…The idea was to cut down on collect calls, which could be labor-intensive since they often required a live operator. The early adopters of toll-free numbers were primarily hotels and car rental companies, which took lots of reservations from across the country over the phone. Because of this, the story of toll-free numbers is also the story of the modern call center.”
The 1-800 toll-free numbers were the early versions of hotlines. Companies had vanity numbers (like URLs of the Internet age) so customers could easily remember them. An example: 1-800-FLOWERS, where the letters translated to digits on the phone keypad. From BeBusinessed: “By the late 90s, most businesses had a secret formula for this that still holds true today. If customers were more likely to get the number from a business card or website, i.e., the phone number was right in front of them, memorableness is not as important. If the average customer is finding you through a billboard, TV or radio ad, it’s important for the number to stick in their memory easily, so vanity numbers work better.”
Any customer could call a brand representative and ask for assistance, report a problem or give feedback. It was only one-way: there was no way for a brand to get in touch with a customer. In fact, unless customers were part of a loyalty program, it was almost impossible for brands to have a 1:1 relationship with customers. At times, the wait times were long. I remember once waiting an hour to speak to an airline representative when my baggage did not arrive after a flight.
From a FastCompany article in 1997: “The 1-800 number, staffed by a customer-service rep who debugs your computer or orders flowers on Valentine’s Day, has become such an institution that it’s hard to believe toll-free dialing has been available only since 1967, and that toll-free service as we know it today has been in place only since 1980. Americans dialed toll-free numbers 20.6 billion times last year. That’s more than 56 million calls a day. Today 40% of all calls on AT&T’s nationwide network are toll-free. The volume has tripled in the last five years.”
With the rise of the Internet starting in the mid-1990s, email addresses and web forms started replacing the 1-800 numbers. Now we have the chat windows (at times powered by bots) that are taking over. The future is probably a hybrid – combining AI (machine intelligence) with human intelligence. Lisa Morgan writes at TechTarget: “Hybrid chatbots not only help to close the gap between human knowledge and the kinds of queries a chatbot can answer, but also help ensure that queries involving an emergency or another emotional issue are dealt with empathetically. This requires adjustments to the words the chatbot uses and a quick handoff to a human agent who understands the customer’s dilemma and the best way to address it.”
From toll-free numbers to “contact us” web pages to chatbots – businesses have always wanted the customer connect. But in the past decade or so, focus and marketing budgets have shifted from existing customers to new customers.
