What is a Call Center?
A call center is a centralized office used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone. A call center is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outgoing calls for telemarketing, clientele, product services, and debt collection are also made. In addition to a call center, collective handling of letters, faxes, live chat, and e-mails at one location is known as a contact center.
A call center is often operated through an extensive open workspace for call center agents, with work stations that include a computer for each agent, a telephone set/headset connected to a telecommunications switch, and one or more supervisor stations. It can be independently operated or networked with additional center, often linked to a corporate computer network, including mainframes, microcomputers and LANs. Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the center are linked through a set of new technologies called computer telephony integration (CTI).
Most major businesses use call centers to interact with their customers. Examples include utility companies, mail order catalog retailers, and customer support for computer hardware and software. Some businesses even service internal functions through call center. Examples of this include help desks, retail financial support, and sales support.
A contact center, also known as customer interaction center is a central point of any organization from which all customer contacts are managed. Through contact centers, valuable information about company are routed to appropriate people, contacts to be tracked and data to be gathered. It is generally a part of company’s customer relationship management (CRM). Today, customers contact companies by calling, emailing, chatting online, visiting websites, faxing and even instant messaging.
Technology
Call center technology is subject to improvements and innovations. Some of these technologies include speech recognition software to allow computers to handle first level of customer support, text mining and natural language processing to allow better customer handling, agent training by automatic mining of best practices from past interactions, support automation and many other technologies to improve agent productivity and customer satisfaction. Automatic lead selection or lead steering is also intended to improve efficiencies, both for inbound and outbound campaigns, whereby inbound calls are intended to quickly land with the appropriate agent to handle the task, whilst minimizing wait times and long lists of irrelevant options for people calling in, as well as for outbound calls, where lead selection allows management to designate what type of leads go to which agent based on factors including skill, socioeconomic factors and past performance and percentage likelihood of closing a sale per lead. The concept of the Universal Queue standardizes the processing of communications across multiple technologies such as fax, phone, and email whilst the concept of a Virtual queue provides callers with an alternative to waiting on hold when no agents are available to handle inbound call demand.
Premise-based Call Center Technology
Historically, call centers have been built on PBX equipment that is owned and hosted by the call center operator. The PBX might provide functions such as Automatic Call Distribution, Interactive Voice Response, and skills-based routing. The call center operator would be responsible for the maintenance of the equipment and necessary software upgrades as released by the vendor.
Virtual Call Center Technology
With the advent of the Software as a service technology delivery model, the virtual call center has emerged. In a virtual call center model, the call center operator does not own, operate or host the equipment that the call center runs on. Instead, they subscribe to a service for a monthly or annual fee with a service provider that hosts the call center telephony equipment in their own data center. Such a vendor may host many call centers on their equipment. Agents connect to the vendor’s equipment through traditional PSTN telephone lines, or over Voice over IP. Calls to and from prospects or contacts originate from or terminate at the vendor’s data center, rather than at the call center operator’s premise. The vendor’s telephony equipment then connects the calls to the call center operator’s agents. (Alternate terms for “virtual call center” include “hosted call center” or “on-demand call center.”)
Call Center Models
Some typical call center models are listed below:
- Contact center – Supports interaction with customers over a variety of media, including but not necessarily limited to telephony, e-mail and internet chat.
Inbound call center – Exclusively or predominantly handles inbound calls (calls initiated by the customer).
Outbound call center – One in which call center agents make outbound calls to customers or sales leads.
Blended call center – Combining automatic call distribution for incoming calls with predictive dialling for outbound calls, it makes more efficient use of agent time as each type of agent (inbound or outbound) can handle the overflow of the other.
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