What is Call Center ?

11:10 AM Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), Call Center, Call Center Agents, Call Center Companies, Call Center Company, Call Centers, Customer Services 1 Comment

A call centre or call center technology is a centralized office used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone. A call center is a physical place where customer and other telephone calls are handled by an organization, usually with some amount of computer automation.

Call center companies administer incoming calls from customer’s inquiries on product support or information. An Outbound or outgoing calls will do for Telemarketing, clientele and debt collection. Moreover, call centre is also a collective managing of e-mails, faxes, and letters.

A call centre is operated through a wide open workplace, with work stations that consist of computers, a headset/telephone connected to a telecom switch, and one or more supervisor stations. It can be separately operated or set up with additional centres, often connected to a corporate computer network, together with mainframes, microcomputers and LAN’s. Additionally, the voice and data pathways into the centre are connected through a set of new technologies called computer telephony integration (CTI).

Most major companies outsource their business to a Call center company to handle and interact with their customers. For instance, such as utility companies, mail order catalogue firms, and customer service or technical support for a computer hardware and software. Some companies even service internal works through call centers such as help desks and sales support.

Call Centers Technology

Call Centers utilize an extensive variety of different technologies that enable them to handle the large volumes of work that need to be managed by the Call Center. These advance technologies guarantee that call center agents are remained as productive as possible. And all calls are queued and processed as rapidly as possible, resulting in good levels of service.

These are the technologies includes:

• ACD (automatic call distribution)
• Agent performance analytics
• BTTC (best time to call)/ Outbound call optimization
• IVR (interactive voice response)
• Guided Speech IVR
• CTI (computer telephony integration)
• Enterprise Campaign Management
• Outbound predictive dialer
• CRM (customer relationship management)
• CIM (customer interaction management. Also known as Unified solutions)
• Email Management
• Chat and Web Collaboration
• Desktop Scripting Solutions
• Outsourcing
• Third Party Verification (Third party verification)
• TTS (text to speech)
• WFM (workforce management)
• Virtual queuing
• Voice analysis
• Voice recognition
• Voicemail
• Voice recording
• VoIP
• Speech Analytics

(Source: Wikipedia - The free encyclopedia.)