Customer service has become one of the most important services, which are being offered to the people. In the consumer driven market, customer service helps businesses to take competitive advantage over others. However, customer service is not something, which was introduced to the world in the recent past. It has existed for hundreds of years. Therefore, it is important to a look at how customer service has evolved along with time.
The evolution of customer service dates back to 1793. In this year, customer loyalty programs were started, with the objective of ensuring customer satisfaction. This concept gave birth to customer service in the long run. During the 1800s, customer service gained popularity. However, customers were only provided with face to face conversations, since sophisticated technologies didn’t exist at that time. For example, people who wanted to repair something they purchased had to go all the way to the merchant to get the job done.
Towards the end of 1800s, the telephone was invented. It took customer care to a whole new level. Telephone is one of the key driving factors of customer support in today’s world. Most of the companies in today’s world use toll free phone numbers in order to offer customer support. The concept of toll free numbers came into this world during 1967. In fact, it was introduced for customer service related purposes. Customers can easily remember support numbers like 1-800-SUPPORT. As a result, they became much popular among businesses.
The first ever call center was started back in 1960. Due to the increasing number of customer concerns, large scale businesses got the need to have their own call centers. Interactive Voice Responses, which are also known as IVRs are also being used in today’s world to offer customer support. The concept of IVRs came into play during the late 1970s. This is one of the promising technologies introduced for the betterment of customer service.
Email and live chat can be considered as the most popular methods, which are being used by businesses in today’s world to offer customer support. These services were introduced to customer support back in 1996. Since the companies started getting an online presence, they found it as an easy task to solve the customer concerns through internet and email. Live chat was introduced after a short while, which also became popular among people. Customers prefer to get in touch with the customer service departments via Live Chat, instead of telephone in today’s world. FoneStore is one of the companies that offer the best customer support service through these sophisticated technologies. You can buy used iPhone on FoneStore, it is safe and easy.
The first ever mobile app for shopping was introduced in 2008. Now it is one of the widely used methods by people in order to get in touch with the customer support teams. In future, we can expect to see some significant technologies in the customer support industry. For example, we can expect call centers to vanish and AI to replace that.
