The History of the Call Center And How Customer Service Got So Annoying

Customer support is a big frustration of the public.

We want to be treated well, we want the human on the other end of the line to correctly pronounce our name, we want them to be friendly even when we're not, and (most importantly) we want our problem solved. Most of the time, we're lucky to get one of these things out of a customer support interaction.

Call centers have grown increasingly sophisticated with time and are in many ways one of the most elaborate operations in a given business.

But unfortunately, they do not follow basic principles.

One of the most important of which, asPeter Theis, the inventor of a number of important telephone-related technologies, including voice mail, says is: "...the focus must be on the communication and not the words that are scripted".

If this basic tenet were to be followed, if the call center operators were not more automated than auttomatic response systems themselves, customer support could achieve what it is actually set up to do,

Source: The History of the Call Center Explains How Customer Service Got So Annoying | Motherboard

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2 Ways to Fix Customer Loyalty Programs

Since 2008, the number of consumers who feel that such initiatives don’t offer any real value jumped by 50%, according to a study by Forrester Research. The same study also found that almost one-third of consumers say that loyalty programs don’t influence their purchase — that’s up from 22% in 2008.
Why the dissatisfaction? Let’s call it the Groupon factor. Since 2008, there have been a flood of daily deal merchants, like Groupon and LivingSocial, that have filled customers inboxes with irrelevant offers. (Groupon itself has recently employed a Pandora-like “thumbs up, thumbs down” rating system to tackle this problem, which is best illustrated by the example of middle-aged men getting offers for bikini waxes.)
Proponents of loyalty programs, however, believe help is on the way thanks to two factors — better targeting and mobile payments.

Swipely Beefs Up Its Credit Card-Based Loyalty Programs

Once a service for simply sharing purchases, Swipely is contining its evolution into a credit-card based loyalty program for small businesses with a set of new merchant tools it announced Tuesday.

The tools allow Swipely’s 350 merchants in Boston, San Francisco and New York to target their customers with deals based on recent purchase interactions with their small businesses. Merchants can, for instance, send a “we miss you” offer to customers who haven’t made purchases within a certain time period or a “thank you note” offer to those who have visited recently.