Customer care goes hi-tech

As one of my colleagues pointed out in her recent blog, "140 years later, what do we know about customer service?", the invention of the telephone in 1876 -- and the subsequent invention of the switchboard in 1894 – ushered in the era of modern telecommunications and provided consumers with a way to more easily voice their concerns to companies with whom they do business. Ever since, companies have been looking for better ways to handle customer care. One of the biggest challenges for communications service providers (CSPs) has been the lack of specific information about the customer who's calling with an issue; their service, their location, their equipment. However, given recent advances, this no longer needs to be a challenge. Thanks to a variety of different analytics applications, when customers call the help desk of their local CSP, customer service representatives (CSRs) are now able to access quite a bit of client-specific information, including the type of access point found in the home, the settings of that device, what network equipment they connect to for service and more.