How do I access my Call History?

When a call lands on an e-commerce firm's customer-care number, what all kinds of information do the service-agent immediately have access to and what all information can they possibly fetch or be presented with, on-the-fly?

• Recently, I had a very positive experience on calling up a reputable e-commerce firm's customer care center, and since I was somewhat relaxed, I made few observations about what all the agent said and started wondering on what all kinds of information does an agent have access to, about me, about my preferences, purchase history, complaint history, my browsing history(!) and of course, of the e-commerce firms own offerings. Coming from a computer science, engineering background and being aware of business-intelligence, analytics etc., I can imagine that there's a lot information that *could* be made available to the agent. However, most typical call-center desktop monitors would have limited screen real-estate, and I can't imagine live analysis and monitoring of the call (NSA, or James-Bond spy thriller grade technology), that the information keeps getting updated on the screen, based on how the conversation is progressing. So, are the agents really trained to be that smart (as I experienced), or do they have a lot of smart IT help ?

• Answer:

  We've had http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephony_Application_Programming_Interface since the days of Windows 95. An implementation was even available for Windows 3.1 TAPI allows software to receive the incoming call's callerID and look up the information. If your phone number is in the system, they have the ability to know everything about you. This technology is 20+ years old, so the solutions are mature. Companies further segment information so that the front line CSR might not have access to everything about you. I don't think they have a tiny monitor. The typical corporate desktop monitor is at least 17" and 1280x1024. They probably can't access your browsing history, but their ad network that placed your tracking cookie can.