Thanks to the British Telephones website for allowing us to reproduce them.Īlready the hallmarks of the call centre can be seen in the rows of agents with individual phone terminals, taking and making calls. They had a GEC PABX 4 ACD, installed in 1965, as seen in the photos. The earliest example of a call centre we can find in the UK is at the The Birmingham Press and Mail.

To date we have not been to find any concrete evidence of this so far. The first ACD systems would probably have emerged in the 1950s to handle central operator enquiries at the main telephone companies. Essentially it replaced the human operator with a far more flexible automated system capable of handling much greater numbers of calls. The invention of ACD technology made the concept of a call centre possible. An algorithm determines which agent receives which call. ACD systems allow calls to be filtered and assigned to the best possible agents available at the time. That computer technology is the Automatic Call Distributor, and its development is closely linked to that of the call centre. such an office providing the centralized customer contact and customer service functions of a large organization. an office staffed and equipped to handle large numbers of telephone calls, using computer technology to assist in the management of calls, supply of information, etc. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term ‘call centre’ as follows:Ĭall centre n. Private Automated Business Exchanges (PABX) began to be used to handle large numbers of customer contacts. Early Automatic Call Distributors (ACD)īut the basic features of the modern call centre can be recognised almost ten years before this, in the mid-1960s. Rockwell’s claim to the first ACD installation may be inaccurate, but they were certainly amongst the first and most successful manufacturers. Rockwell did indeed develop their ACD in 1973 and it was installed that year. This states that call centres as we know them today originate from the Automatic Call Distributor developed in 1973 by US firm Rockwell (the Rockwell Galaxy) to allow Continental Airlines to run a telephone booking system.Īs it turns out, this was all good marketing baloney. Like many revolutionary technologies, the call centre has a creation myth. I knew of some early ones, but what was the first? I have done some research and the early results are quite surprising.

I was once asked by a researcher for the BBC, for a documentary on contact centres, for the date of the first call centre in the UK.

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