Call centre

A call centre (British English) or call center (American English) is a centralised office used for receiving or transmitting a large volume of enquiries by telephone. An inbound call center is operated by a company to administer incoming product or service support or information enquiries from consumers. Outbound call centers are operated for telemarketing, for solicitation of charitable or political donations, debt collection, market research, emergency notifications, and urgent/critical needs blood banks. A contact center, further extension to call centers administers centralized handling of individual communications, including letters, faxes, live support software, social media, instant message, and e-mail. A call center has an open workspace for call centre agents, with work stations that include a computer and display for each agent, a telephone set/headset connected to a telecom switch or to an inbound/outbound call management system, and one or more supervisor stations. It can be independently operated or networked with additional centres, often linked to a corporate computer network, including mainframes, microcomputer/servers and LANs. Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the centre are linked through a set of new technologies called computer telephony integration. The contact centre is a central point from which all customer contacts are managed. Through contact centres, 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 infrastructure. The majority of large companies use contact centres as a means of managing their customer interactions. These centres can be operated by either an in house department responsible or outsourcing customer interaction to a third party agency (known as Outsourcing Call Centres). The origins of call centres dates back to the 1960s with the UK-based Birmingham Press and Mail, which installed Private Automated Business Exchanges (PABX) to have rows of agents handling customer contacts. By 1973, call centres received mainstream attention after Rockwell International patented its Galaxy Automatic Call Distributor (GACD) for a telephone booking system as well as the popularization of telephone headsets as seen on televised NASA Mission Control Center events. During the late 1970s, call centre technology expanded to include telephone sales, airline reservations and banking systems. The term 'call centre' was first published and recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1983. The 1980s experienced the development of toll-free telephone numbers to increase the efficiency of agents and overall call volume. Call centres increased with the deregulation of long-distance calling and growth in information dependent industries. As call centres expanded, unionisation occurred in North America to gain members including the Communications Workers of America and the United Steelworkers. In Australia, the National Union of Workers represents unionised workers; their activities form part of the Australian labour movement. In Europe, Uni Global Union of Switzerland is involved in assisting unionisation in this realm and in Germany Vereinte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft represents call centre workers. During the 1990s, call centres expanded internationally and developed into two additional subsets of communication, contact centres and outsourced bureau centres. A contact centre is defined as a coordinated system of people, processes, technologies and strategies that provides access to information, resources, and expertise, through appropriate channels of communication, enabling interactions that create value for the customer and organisation. In contrast to in-house management, outsourced bureau contact centres are a model of contact centre that provide services on a 'pay per use' model. The overheads of the contact centre are shared by many clients, thereby supporting a very cost effective model, especially for low volumes of calls. The modern contact center includes automated call blending of inbound and outbound calls as well as predictive dialing capabilities dramatically increasing agents productivity. Latest implementations with more complex systems, require highly skilled operational and management staff that can use multichannel online and offline tools to improve customer interactions. Call centre technologies include: 'Caller ID' (US Patent: 4,797,911, Claim 42 - Customer Account Online Servicing) a method that instantly displays caller's identity including customer information (assuming their phone number was present in the database) and speech recognition software which allowed Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems to handle first levels of customer support, text mining, natural language processing to allow better customer handling, agent training via interactive scripting and automatic mining using 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. This allows inbound calls to be directly routed to the appropriate agent for the task, whilst minimising wait times and long lists of irrelevant options for people calling in. Outbound Predictive Dialing introduced in mid 80's (US Patents: 4,797, 911 - Customer account online servicing system, revolutionized call center industry. Agents no longer waste time looking up and dialing customers, listening to; busy, no answer, disconnected number, answering machines type conditions. Agents only speak with customers who answered their phones (US Patent: 4,540,855 - Detecting signals within a passband on a telephone line). By deploying outbound predictive dialing, agent productivity has tripled, i.e., a single agent can perform the work of three.