Have you ever heard of Talkomatic? Neither did we until we looked it up. As it turns out, Talkomatic was the first instant messaging application, created by Donald Bitzer at the University of Illinois in 1974. It ran on the PLATO system (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), which was developed in…

With a proliferation of self service channels such as the web, mobile and kiosks – all of which are often managed by contact centers – it is important that customers must be guided, albeit subtly, to choose the right service channel so as to manage the costs of multichannel interactions. Often, customers…